From Childhood to Eternity: A Timeline of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Famous Bromance

Hollywood can be a weird place, so much so that it's often nicknamed "Holly-weird." In this tough business, you need to have as many people on your side who knew you when, and it pays even more if the people you know are also in the same field as you. That's why celebrity friendships are probably the most adorable thing the glamorously controversial city has to offer.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's 40-plus-year friendship is one we'll never grow tired of seeing. The Massachusetts-born actors rose to the top of their careers together and were considered a bromance long before the term became a thing.

Throughout the years, Matt and Ben have discussed what has kept their friendship alive. Keep reading to slide down the A-listers' friendship timeline.

Ben and Matt's bromance began when they were children growing up in Cambridge, Mass. When they were 8 and 10, respectively, they bonded over living in the same neighborhood and their shared love of baseball and acting. According to his 2007 interview with Parade, Ben said he wouldn't know how his life nor career would've ended up had their paths not crossed.

"Matt gave acting a framework, an integration into the social hierarchy at school,” he explained. “As a teenager, the natural thing is to have friends who have common interests and so you fit together seamlessly. Before Matt, I was by myself. Acting was a solo activity where I’d just goof and do something, act in a little TV show or something, and no one understood it. None of the other kids knew what it was I did, how it worked, or anything. All of a sudden I had this friend,Matt, and he gets it and wants to do it and thinks it’s interesting and wants to talk about it.Soon both of us are doing it.”

As teenagers, Ben and Matt took acting classes, auditioned for commercials, and appeared in small TV and film roles. In 1989, they landed their first movie roles together in Field of Dreams.

They encouraged each other to keep going despite constant rejection. During this time, they also began writing together, developing the creative partnership that would later define their careers. In 1992, Matt and Ben were offered more supporting roles as Brendan Fraser's bullies in the 1992 film, School Ties.

Though they briefly separated to attend different colleges, Matt and Ben didn't wait too long in Hollywood before they started receiving Oscar buzz. In 1994, they started working on the script that would become the classic, Good Will Hunting. Matt started writing the script for a playwriting class during his fifth year at Harvard. After he showed Ben the script, he asked to get onboard, and they began writing their script.

"We would improvise and drink like six or twelve beers or whatever and record it with a tape recorder," Ben said of his and Matt's early writing days. "

In 1995, Ben and Matt sold the script for Good Will Hunting to Miramax for $1 million.

Good Will Hunting became a monumental success for both Ben and Matt's careers. Their Oscar win catapulted them into success, making them instant A-list movie stars, with Ben leading movies like Pearl Harbor and Gone Girl, while Matt got into his action star bag with the Bourne series, and thrillers like The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Departed. Still, they remained connected to each other both personally and professionally.

During the '90s and early 2000s, Matt and Ben acted alongside each other in several of director Kevin Smith's movies, including Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. In the latter role, the friends made a satirical sequel to Good Will Hunting. Matt also appeared in several films that Ben starred in, including The Third Wheel and Jersey Girl. Off-screen, the pals are often seen together at awards shows and in appearances.

Although their careers thrived individually, in 2021, Matt and Ben decided to go back to where their careers began. They teamed up to write the screenplay for The Last Duel, a historical action drama they co-wrote with Nicole Holofcenter. Ben and Matt also starred in the film as Count Pierre d’Alençon and a knight, respectively. The project was something they said took far less time than when they wrote Good Will Hunting 27 years prior.

"Good Will Hunting took us so long. We were like unemployed, broke guys. It took us forever to write that screenplay," Matt explained during his and Ben's interview with The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. "I think we wrote thousands and thousands of pages. We didn't really know what we were doing and I think that kind of put us off writing again because we never thought we'd have the time."

The longtime collaborators continued working together in 2022 when they co-starred in the Michael Jordan biopic, Air. In the film, which followed Jordan's historic partnership with Nike Air, Ben played Nike CEO Phil Knight and directed the film, while Matt played Sonny Vaccaro, the sports marketing executive who made the deal happen.

After over 30 years of friendship, Ben and Matt have proven that their bond is unbreakable. Their celebrity bromance has stood the test of time and have seen them through several marriages and, in Ben's case, divorces. Since 2005, Matt has been happily married to his wife, Luciana Barroso. Although he shared on The Howard Stern Show that Luciana thought Ben was cuter than him when she saw Good Will Hunting in high school, the couple, who share four children, are stronger than ever. Ben's love life, however, is a bit more colorful.

The Argo star has had several high-profile relationships. However, his most notable ones are his marriages to Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Lopez. In 2005, he and Jennifer Garner married and went on to welcome three children together before their 2018 divorce. Ben then went on to marry Jennifer Lopez, who he was famously engaged to in the early 2000s before ultimately marrying Jennifer Garner. However, the couple's marriage only lasted two years, and they finalized their divorce in 2025 after separating in 2024.

Both Ben and Matt have agreed their friendship is a constant. In addition to navigating their love lives together, they faced the loss of Matt's dad, Kent Damon, together, as well as Ben's battles with alcohol addiction, for which he entered rehab throughout the years. According to his interview about Matt in the actor's 2021 GQ profile, he sweetly shared how their friendship keeps him sane.

"My own kind of sanity and mental health really benefited from having someone who I grew up with and knew as a child who was also going through something similar — this 20-year-plus journey of being in the public eye — who I could reflect on it with honestly, talk things over with, be myself with, who I knew why we were friends, why he was interested and loved me, why I loved him," Ben explained.

"I don't want to be his friend in public, you know what I mean?" he said. "It's way too important a friendship for that, and it goes so beyond this career or anything. You know, it's a significant part of my life and not for public consumption in that way."