Ben Affleck Confesses Why He And Matt Damon Added Random Gay Sex Scenes To 'Good Will Hunting' Script

Who knew the iconic line “How do you like them apples?” might be spiritually adjacent to a stack of random gay sex scenes that never made it into Good Will Hunting? At least, that’s how its writers—Boston buddies Ben Affleck and Matt Damon—have described one of their more chaotic attempts to figure out who was actually reading their script.

For anyone somehow unfamiliar with the Oscar-winning Affleck-Damon bromance: the two met as kids in Cambridge, Massachusetts—Affleck was 8, Damon was 10—and grew up a block and a half apart. They bonded over acting, moved in together after high school, and started grinding through auditions.

Around the same time, Damon was attending Harvard University, where a drama class assignment required him to write a 40-page script. Needless to say, that assignment changed their lives.

Damon reflected on the writing process during an appearance on The Tonight Show:

“It took us forever to write that screenplay… We were, like, unemployed, broke guys.”

Once the script was finished, Affleck and Damon began sharing it with studios on the condition that they would star as Will and Chuckie. Castle Rock Entertainment reportedly purchased the rights but asked for revisions, a request that irritated the pair and inspired their now-infamous experiment.

Affleck explained the experiment in a 2013 interview with Boston magazine:

“We were so frustrated that Castle Rock wasn’t reading the script, so we felt like we had to develop this test. We started writing in screen direction like: ‘[Therapist] Sean talks to Will and unloads his conscience.’ And then: ‘Will takes a moment and then gives Sean a soulful look and leans in and starts blowing him.’”

That’s right, folks. To test whether executives were actually reading the script, Affleck and Damon inserted a graphic gay sex scene halfway through and sent the revised draft to major studios.

And Damon made it pretty clear just how impossible the scenes were to miss:

“They weren’t reading the script closely anymore. It was literally probably a full paragraph about what these two characters were doing to each other.”

At that point, the joke wasn’t exactly subtle. The scenes were graphic, extended, and impossible to confuse with metaphor. And yet, the notes kept coming back as if nothing unusual had happened on the page.

Affleck, underscoring just how telling the silence was:

“We would turn that in, and they wouldn’t ever mention all those scenes where Sean and Will were jerking each other off.”

Eventually, one producer did flag the scene: Harvey Weinstein—yes, that Harvey Weinstein, the now-convicted sexual predator—confirming to Affleck and Damon that he had actually read the draft. The script ultimately landed at Miramax, which released Good Will Hunting in 1997. Damon played Will, Affleck played Chuckie, and Robin Williams portrayed Sean.

All that effort paid off, including the fake sex scenes that never made it to screen. Good Will Hunting earned widespread acclaim, and in 1998, Affleck and Damon won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Affleck, then 25, remains the youngest winner in that category.

But fast-forward to 2026, and Affleck is reexamining that stunt with more distance—and significantly more side-eye—during an appearance on the All the Smoke podcast with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, where the hosts asked whether the long-circulating urban legend about hidden sex scenes was actually true.

Affleck, confirming it outright, “Yeah, we did.” But after nearly two decades since the movie came out, Affleck’s tone had shifted.

Affleck told the hosts:

“It was actually a scene where the therapist gave Will a bl*wjob. We put, like, one sentence: ‘And then he starts blowing him,’ and only one or two actually gave back the note, and was like: ‘Maybe... Maybe cut that part out.’”

Williams ultimately won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Sean, an irony that isn’t lost in retrospect.

The actors explained the frustration behind the stunt:

“Because we were frustrated! After a while of like… You do stuff, and then you get these notes to do something that was kind of already in the script. I realized later on that’s actually kind of a common thing.”

Looking back, he characterized the move as something they thought they could get away with, simply because they were “young and stupid.”

Posted on January 15, you can watch the full interview clip from the podcast below:

Some readers found the stunt funny, while others gave it serious side-eye:

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Affleck is currently promoting The Rip, a 2026 Netflix crime thriller that reunites him with Damon. The film stars the two as Miami-Dade narcotics officers who uncover millions in cash during a stash-house raid, triggering a tense internal investigation into corruption and loyalty,nspired by the true story of Miami-Dade County Sheriff Chris Casiano.

You can catch the trailer below:

- YouTube Netflix

The ensemble cast includes Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Kyle Chandler, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Sasha Calle. This time, the provocation stays on screen, rather than buried in a script as a test.