Los Angeles: Hollywood stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon managed to blow through $600,000 in six months.
Before sharing a Best Original Screenplay Oscar win, the longtime pals and collaborators shared a bank account, but once the struggling young actors and writers deposited their check for selling the script for “Good Will Hunting”, it wasn’t long before they maxed out their joint savings, reports ‘Entertainment Weekly’.
“When we sold ‘Good Will Hunting’, I was like, ‘We are now rich for life. My needs are over. I will never have to work again,'” Affleck said during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show this week.
Then he broke down just how quickly that turned out not to be the case: “We sold it for $600,000, we split that, $300,000 each, and then the agents got $30,000. So we had $270,000, and we paid about $160,000 in taxes, so we had $110,000, each bought $55,000 Jeep Cherokees, and then had $55,000 left, which naturally we decided to rent a $5,000-a-month party house on Glencoe Way by the Hollywood Bowl, and we were broke in six months.”
“I always thought it was perfectly normal,” Affleck told Drew of sharing an account with his best bro. “We would work a little bit. We would do extra work, or a line here and there – the occasional Burger King commercial – and then take that money and put it in the account. We were friends and we wanted each other to succeed and we love each other, so it seemed clear like, ‘Let’s do this together,’ and in retrospect, really valuable because I think kind of starting out in a field like that can feel very lonely.”
As per ‘Entertainment Weekly’, before their party rental, the actors lived together in a more modest apartment in Los Angeles’ Eagle Rock neighbourhood, where they wrote the prize-winning screenplay. Affleck recently shared his struggles with Damon during that period.
“I would not suggest living with him,” Affleck said on ‘The Late Late Show’ earlier this month, explaining that he and younger brother Casey Affleck once went on a cleaning strike to see how long it would take Damon to pick up after himself.
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