Matt Damon and Casey Affleck Reflect on Life Before Fame: 'We Had Mattresses On the Floor'

Any story about Matt Damon and Casey Affleck must start with Boston. It’s their home, where they met, became friends and started their acting careers. The city also serves as the backdrop for soooo many of their charming anecdotes.

Here’s one: Growing up in the 1980s, the two of them—along with Affleck’s older brother, Ben —found work as extras by hitting up a family friend who happened to be a local casting agent. They had slightly different approaches to the work, Damon recalls.

“Ben and I were in high school and took it very seriously,” Damon says. “But Casey had it figured out. He’d show up with a basketball because if you came with a prop, you’d get an extra $5.”

Casey chimes in, “They did crowd work. I liked to stand out, so I’d do individual street crossing!”

Fast forward almost 40 years, and Damon, 53, and Affleck, 48, both are instantly recognizable movie stars with seven Oscar nominations and two trophies between them. (Damon won in 1998 for writing Good Will Hunting with Ben; Casey nabbed Best Actor for 2016’s Manchester by the Sea .) They’ve acted together in projects like the Ocean’s trilogy and in last year’s smash Oppenheimer (albeit without any shared scenes.) Now they’re the leads in a scrappy and smart comedy-thriller heist movie. Guess where it takes place?

In The Instigators (in select theaters on Aug. 2; streaming on Apple TV+ on Aug. 9), they play Boston-area dads from different backgrounds brought together to rob the city’s corrupt mayor. After the heist goes awry, the pair go on the run even as they’re pursued by criminals and various law enforcements. ( Hong Chau , Jack Harlow , Ron Perlman , Ving Rhames and Michael Stuhlbarg round out the ensemble.)

“Our primary goal was that it would be fun and the audience was going to have fun and we wouldn’t overstay our welcome,” Damon explains.

No doubt “fun” is the operative word for these two judging by their dynamic during a joint interview recently with Parade . At the outset, Damon—Zooming from his home in Brooklyn Heights—cheerfully offers this about the slightly tardy Affleck: “I’ll give him s–t when he comes on … I’ve been doing it for 40-something years!”

After the L.A.-based Affleck pops onscreen, Damon fulfills his promise.

Affleck replies, “Hey, it’s a little earlier out here!”

Their relationship is akin to a brotherhood. They like to talk shop and cheer on their Boston sports teams. Their kids are all friends. Damon and his wife, Luciana Barroso , have daughters, Isabella , 18, Gia , 15, and Stella , 13, and stepdaughter, Alexia , 26. Affleck and his ex Summer Phoenix share two sons, Indiana , 20, and Atticus , 16.

Related: Matt Damon Makes Rare Red Carpet Appearance With Wife and All 4 Daughters

“Casey’s kids are older and cooler,” Damon says. “And Indie is a handsome young gentleman. When he comes to dinner at our house, it causes quite a stir!”

Three days after their Parade interview, Damon and Affleck were set to throw out the first pitch in Fenway Park as their beloved Boston Red Sox played the New York Yankees. (FYI, one key scene in The Instigators is set inside the historic baseball stadium.) While they were excited about it, Damon joked, “If we embarrass ourselves, don’t put it in the story!”

OK, deal. But everything else is fair game for this week’s Parade cover story.

Mara Reinstein: So, no nerves about the first pitch?

Matt Damon: We’ve played a lot of games of catch in our lives, so it’s not going to be an issue. I mean, if we have to throw a strike from the mound, that’s a little harder.

Casey Affleck: I had surgery on my elbow and haven’t thrown a baseball in a couple of years, so this will be my first time!

Damon: He has a really good arm. I’m only worried if Casey’s elbow falls off.

[UPDATE: They handled it beautifully .]

Matt, didn’t you and Ben sit in Fenway Park as extras during that famous Moonlight Graham scene in Field of Dreams ?

Damon: Yeah, we were two of 3,000 extras for a few days. And Casey used to sell sausages outside the park on Yawkey Way.

Affleck: It was illegal! But I did it in eighth grade, ninth grade and tenth grade.

Was The Instigators always going to be set in Boston?

Affleck: It’s possible we would have re-set it there if it wasn’t. It’s just easier to make a movie where you know the place inside and out.

Casey also co-wrote the screenplay. Did you always have Matt in mind to play your partner in crime?

Damon: Absolutely not!

Affleck: I send Matt everything, and it’s usually “No.” So now it’s just an exercise in rejection.

Damon: I think it's because he hadn’t written this for me that I really wanted to do it. But Casey showed it to me, and I started talking to him about it. Midnight Run [from 1988] is one of our favorite movies, and it's kind of the North Star if you're going to try to do a movie like this. Hopefully our movie is like that. You care about the characters and it leaves you with something.

Related: Meet Luciana Barroso, the Bartender Who Stole Oppenheimer Star Matt Damon's Heart

Do you think about your friendship when you film a movie together?

Damon: You can’t not think about it. I don't think we think about it in the terms that people on the outside do. I mean, Casey drives me absolutely crazy, and I say this in a loving way, like the way your brother [Ben] can drive me crazy. But I love working with him because he pushes me and I push him. And there's something very, very nice about it. We tend to spend a lot of time in this business on diplomacy. People's egos are involved, and you don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. But with Casey or with Ben, the dance is just entirely dispensed with, and we just are very blunt with each other. It really helps to have people that you've known for a long time because it's never in doubt that there's an underlying love and respect and loyalty to each other.

Casey, what’s your take on it?

Affleck: He said it perfectly. But coincidentally I just had this experience last night: So I smashed my toe really bad, and I had to go out with my girlfriend [actress Caylee Cowan ] to Rite Aid late at night. We hobbled up to the door just as the store was locking up. So we turned around in this empty parking lot and I’m hopping on one foot. I looked up, and there was this Instigators poster all lit up with our dumb faces on it. I just laughed aloud. It was funny after all these years that the two of us are up there on this huge billboard. Times like that I think it’s really funny, and I think about our friendship. But not when we’re filming the movie.

You two lived together in L.A. with Ben in the mid-‘90s before hitting it big with Good Will Hunting . Do you miss that time in your life or are you relieved that you’re no longer struggling?

Damon: When I say Casey drives me crazy, it's rooted in experience like that. Like Casey graduated high school, and he and his close friend who had also graduated high school moved in with Ben and me. So we’re in our early 20s, and these two 18-year-olds wreaked havoc on our living situation for a year. But we had a great time and those were actually really wonderful years. I do look back now on those years really fondly. But it wasn't easy—we were all worried and it was a very insecure time. We all had mattresses on the floor. The house was a mess. We were young and full of ideas and nervous about what our lives would bring, and I don't miss that feeling.

Affleck: I’m nostalgic for any period other than the last 10 years. Like anything before I turned 30 was really the best. I was, like, sleeping on the floor and had really difficult and challenging things going on in my life but I still love that period because it was so fun. In some ways, it was really fun to not think about a career at all and not have any personal expenses and responsibilities, and to just take jobs that you liked that were exciting and just a little bit beyond your grasp. Matt and I did a play together in London [ This Is Our Youth in 2002], and I thought it was so new and exciting.

Did you honestly foresee each other’s wild success?

Affleck: Well, Matt was older than me—I was in high school when he started to work. Also, I always assume that it's easy to see the talent and intelligence in others, and feel like, Jeez, I hope nobody notices that I don't have any of that . Everyone feels like a fraud a little bit. So I was never surprised that Ben and Matt succeeded because I was around for them for years and watched them write their own success.

And Matt gave Casey his Oscar-winning role as a grieving father in Manchester by the Sea. Could you ever imagine the day?

Damon: That was the best role that I'd seen in maybe 20 years. But I couldn’t do it because I had The Martian and a big spate of work lined up. I told Kenny [writer-director Kenneth Lonergan], “The only person in the world that I will give this role to is Casey” because he was the only person who could do it the way it deserved to be done. I'm not surprised at all by any of Casey’s success. He's one of the best actors in the world, and he has been for a very long time.

Matt, your daughter took the Parade cover photo. That must have been quite the proud dad moment!

Damon: That’s Alexia. She’s 26 now and has always had an incredible eye. She's always wanted to be a photographer and cinematographer. That's the part of the business that always appealed to her. Now she took these shots of us that are on a cover! There was a moment when she was like, “OK, sit back-to-back on the floor.” And Casey turns to me and goes, “There is no one else in the world I would do this for.” She’s like a secret weapon.

Do you think your other daughters will be artists, too?

Damon: You know they're not quite all adults yet. Our second-oldest is on her way to college, and then we've got a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old. But I want them to do whatever they want. We don’t put any pressure on them. I think oftentimes, it seems to be generational—you grow up in the circus, and so the circus seems like kind of a normal way of life. But I don't know that any of my other kids will go into it. I can see the younger three all doing various different jobs and doing them really well.

Casey, are your sons interested in the Hollywood thing?

Affleck: I hope they don’t do the Hollywood thing. Also, it's just hard to know what you want to do with your time. They’ve both done plays and theater programs and have made little films at home. That's what we were doing at that age, so if that's any indication, then maybe they will. But I don't think the movie business has quite the same allure that it did when I was their age, because so many other things scratch that itch. So they don't go to movies as much, they don't watch movies quite as much as we did. I think they love expressing themselves dramatically for sure. But I'm not sure if they're dying to go be in a movie.

When was the last time you went to the movies?

Affleck: I just took my son to see Lawrence of Arabia , the new 70-millimeter print, at The Egyptian. And it was unbelievably beautiful and this overwhelming cinematic experience that I hadn’t had in years. It was in this beautifully renovated movie theater, and the movie really casts a spell. Movies now just don’t do that. It’s a bummer that people don't often go out of their house and show up to see something like that.

Is that why both of you also write and produce? You have to stay fulfilled, no?

Affleck: I think so. You have to do that to stay creatively satisfied between new things and take on new challenges. At a certain point, you feel like you have your own stories you want to tell, now that you start to feel like you understand how movies are made and that you can be the person who's in charge for once.

A very important last question: What’s your Dunkin’ order?

Damon: Large regular coffee. I try to cut down on the sugar now, but that's my coffee order. And then, and then, it just depends on … you know, I love a chocolate doughnut.

Affleck: Chocolate glazed and a large black coffee for me.

Damon: Yeah, but his coffee has cream and sugar in it!

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Next, All About Matt Damon's Four Kids With Luciana Barroso