The death scene that could have changed Ben Affleck’s career

(Source: Alamy)

Saturday 28 September 2024 16:20, United Kingdom

Platonic life partners Ben Affleck and Matt Damon may have had acting careers before the release Goodwill huntingbut none of them even tried to deny that everything they had today was due to the movie.

After undergoing a Sylvester Stallone-like odyssey through countless studios to ensure they would be able to land their leading roles on camera and gain recognition as writers, the duo’s persistence paid off handsomely when Gus Van Sant’s drama became one of the biggest hits of 1997.

Goodwill hunting it made back more than 20 times its box office budget, permeated pop culture, won Robin Williams an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, earned another eight nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, and rewarded Affleck and Damon with the award for “Best Original Screenplay.”

They were just 25 and 27 years old at the time, and over thirty years later, Affleck remains the youngest person in history to win that particular Oscar. A few years later, Boston’s best friends were everywhere, but things could have turned out very differently for Batman in the future if he had agreed to Van Sant’s bizarre request to kill Chuckie Sullivan.

“Gus and Ben came to Memphis while I was filming RainmakerDamon remembered Film scouts. “When we were working on the script, Gus said, ‘I want Chuckie flattened on a construction site.’ What do you mean? ‘Killed. Crushed like a bug. I want someone to say, “Chuckie was killed; was crushed like a worm.” Ben and I said, “That’s a terrible idea!” You can’t kill him!”

No matter how bad the idea they knew, they went ahead with it anyway, as one of many sketches Goodwill hunting it went through the entire journey towards the screen. When the filmmaker was presented with the changes Van Sant had requested, he immediately understood the couple’s hesitation.

“When Gus read it, he said, ‘That’s a terrible idea,’ so we threw it out,” Damon explained. “We probably have it on our hard drive somewhere. We also have Will’s death somewhere on our hard drive. That was the original ending.” Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and everyone understood that it was in their best interest not to spoil the scriptwriters’ original vision too much.

Would Affleck experience as much afterGoodwill hunting success if Chuckie was killed at the end of the second act? That’s debatable. Damon would have been fine as the title character, but by the time the story reached its conclusion, there was a distinct possibility that poor Chuckie, squashed like a bug, would end up as little more than an afterthought.