Unknown Matt Damon Facts From Being Related To Ben Affleck & Living In A Commune

Matt Damon and fellow Boston native Ben Affleck are more than just childhood friends. According to the New England Genealogical Society, the Good Will Hunting Oscar winning screenwriters and co-stars are tenth cousins, once removed. Both are descended from William Knowlton Jr., a bricklayer who made his way to the United States from England in the 1630s.

Okay, so Matt Damon isn't perfect. He and Good Will Hunting love interest Minnie Driver began a real romance while the film was in production. When the picture received nine Academy Award nominations, Damon hit the awards circuit. On The Oprah Winfrey Show, he denied he had a girlfriend. This was a surprise to Driver, who thought they were still a couple.

"It's horrendous breaking up with someone anyway, but to have it be so public and to be cast in a role that I would never play if they were paying me - this wronged woman," Driver stated during a 1998 interview with the Los Angeles Times.

"It's unfortunate that Matt went on 'Oprah'; it seemed like a good forum for him to announce to the world that we were no longer together, which I found fantastically inappropriate. Of course, he was busy declaring his love for me on David Letterman a month previously."

Damon, you dog. 

Damon lost 40 pounds with extreme diet and exercise for the role of Specialist Ilario in Courage Under Fire (1996). His character, a soldier experiencing the devastating after effects of war, becomes addicted to heroin. Damon's health suffered from the weight loss; he had to take medication for a year and a half to correct the stress he put on his adrenal gland. Despite the trauma, it was worth it in the end. Matt's commitment and method style of acting caught the eye of Francis Ford Coppola, who cast the actor in the lead role of his 1997 legal drama The Rainmaker.

Matt’s brother Kyle visited a physicist on the MIT campus one day. While walking down the school's Infinite Corridor, which is lined with blackboards, Kyle, an artist, picked up a piece of a chalk and wrote an elaborate, totally fake, equation.

As Matt said in his 2016 commencement speech at MIT, no one erased the bogus equation for months. Kyle was so stunned by these blackboards, he told his brother, “you guys, listen to this... They’ve got blackboards running down the hall! Because these kids are so smart they just need to, you know, drop everything and solve problems!”

During Damon's 2016 commencement speech at MIT, Damon admitted he attended Harvard but didn't graduate, because his movie career started to take off.

“I don’t even have a college degree. As you might have heard, I went to Harvard. I just didn’t graduate from Harvard. I got pretty close, but I started to get movie roles and didn’t finish all my courses. I put on a cap and gown and walked with my class; my mom and dad were there and everything; I just never got an actual degree.You could say I kind of fake graduated."

Damon was only 12 credits short of graduating from the Ivy; he took the time away from class to audition for, then appear in, Geronimo: An American Legend (1993). It wasn't for naught, however. Damon began the screenplay for Good Will Hunting in a playwriting class at Harvard.

Damon's parents divorced when he was two years old. The actor and his brother, Kyle, were raised by their mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early childhood education at Lesley College. When Matt was 10, he and his family moved into a commune in Central Square, Boston, which was shared with five other families. The experience influenced his political tendencies, which he describes as "democratically leaning from the left.”