Matt Damon Just Got Seriously Real About How He Navigated His Overnight Superstardom And Managed To Avoid The “Scrutiny” His Best Friend Ben Affleck Faces

They bonded over their shared love of acting, and without nepotism or wealthy parents to guide them, they supported one another as they desperately tried to get their big break.

In fact, during their late teens and early 20s, they literally shared a bank account while living together, which meant that if one of them booked a job, the other could afford to go on auditions in New York. 

Speaking on The Bill Simmons Podcast, Ben summarized: “We were going to help each other and be there for each other… It was like, ‘You’re not going to be alone. I’m not going to be alone. Let’s go out there and do this together.’”

They even won the Best Original Screenplay award in 1998. Ben was only 25 years old at the time and remains the youngest winner in the award’s history.

But despite their careers kicking off at exactly the same time in exactly the same way, it’s fair to say that the two have had wildly different experiences with celebrity and fame.

While Matt is largely out of the headlines, Ben has consistently been a topic of conversation for pop culture lovers everywhere — largely thanks to his high-profile relationships with the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Garner.

In fact, Ben is still dominating headlines at this very moment, with his and J.Lo’s rumored divorce being a hot topic of conversation in recent months. 

After being asked how he handled the “fame element” of his industry success, Matt said: “It was really disorientating, is the best way I can describe it. It’s a very surreal experience… I think the headiest part for me was, it’s like somebody rewrites a piece of your code in the Matrix, but only for you.”

“You know, intellectually, that everything that mattered yesterday, globally, still matters today,” he went on. “The world is just never going to be the same for you; when you walk into a room, suddenly everybody turns and looks.”

“It’s a very, very bizarre, disorientating feeling,” Matt reiterated. “It feels like the world revolves around you because your experience is so entirely changed, but of course nothing really changed in the bigger picture.”

For context, Matt met his wife, Luciana Barroso, when she was a single mom working in a bar in Miami back in 2003. 

“There were three or four years where I had a couple of duffle bags with all of my shit and I just went from job to job because the only place that I was treated entirely normally was in the circus with my fellow circus performers,” Matt explained. “Movie crews didn’t care; they’re around it all the time, and they just wanted to get to work, and I just wanted to get to work.”

“So I kind of hid for a few years that way while I got my bearings, and then, luckily, I fell in love with someone who was not in the business and who would tolerate that side of it,” he continued. “And that really helped me, because all of that magazine culture that was so huge, Us Weekly and all that stuff 25 years ago, kind of ignored me because it wasn’t that exciting a story.”

“The guy who’s married, it’s so boring,” Matt said. “So they sent, I’m sure, some photographers twenty-something years ago around, and I was like: ‘Well, I can out-wait you. I’ll just sit in my house, and if I leave, I’m going out, and I’m with my wife,’ like, there’s nothing there.”

“What would sell those things were scandals and sex and all that stuff that people would read a gossip magazine for,” he went on. “And as long as you didn’t do any of that stuff, it really wasn’t worth their time to wait and take your picture, and so I was kind of getting left alone.”

“I was walking the kids to school, we were living in New York and I was pushing her in a stroller,” he began. “I saw a photographer up ahead, and I’d done this walk 200 days in a row and never had any problem, and I saw the guy, he was a block away, and I saw his lens.

“I dropped the kids off, and I came out and I said: ‘Hey, can I talk to you a second, like, what’s going on? Why are you here?’” Matt recalled. “And he was like: ‘No, no, you just had a baby, so we’re updating the shot, and that’s it.’ He took one picture a block and a half away, and I didn’t get my picture taken at all in New York for the next couple of years.”

“I’ve been really lucky in that way,” the star mused. “Like, if something happens, they come and get a little updated shot, other than that, I’ve been really lucky — especially when I look at my friends, like [Casey’s] brother.”

Ben himself has previously admitted that he doesn’t enjoy the constant attention, recently saying on Kevin Hart’s Hart to Heart: “I see myself as a director, but I'm a little bit shy. I also don't like a lot of attention.”

“This is why people see me [and] they're like, ‘Well, this dude always mad…’” he added. “Because somebody has their camera and sticking [it in] my face!"