Matt Damon and Ben Affleck included gay sex scene in ‘Good Will Hunting’
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote a gay sex scene into Good Will Hunting to trick Hollywood producers.
The 1997 hit film Good Will Hunting once featured an oral sex scene between the two male professors but it was just a ploy to test producers on whether they’d read the script
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s script was hot property in 1997 with several film studios wanting the rights. One of the companies was Miramax Films, at the time run by Harvey Weinstein who was confused about the sex scene’s relevance to the film.
Weinstein said: “I said, ‘Guys, there’s just one thing on the script … I just have one really big note. About page 60, this whole big sex scene. What the hell is that? Because the guys are straight, and there’s no hint of anything like that … I don’t get that scene.'”
The two professors, played by Stellan Skarsgård and the late Robin Williams, perform oral sex on each other in the scene. The two characters are straight in the film and Williams’ character often talks about his wife.
Damon and Affleck told Weinstein that the scene had been purposefully added to test whether he and other producers had read the full script. Weinstein was the only producer who mentioned it.
“They said ‘No one brought that scene up, or maybe people thought it was a mistake or maybe nobody read it themselves.’ They said, ‘You’re the only guy that brought it up. You get the movie.””
The film’s rights had already been sold to Castle Rock but Damon and Affleck suspected that nobody at the studio had actually read the script.
Good Willing Hunting made over £130 million worldwide. It earned Robin Williams the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award and Affleck and Damon the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
