You can count on your friends to stand up for you — and that’s exactly what Matt Damon is doing for longtime best friend Ben Affleck. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Damon says the tabloid perception of Affleck couldn’t be further from the truth.
Jennifer Lopez Is Still a Fan of Ben Affleck’s Movies
“There’s nobody who’s more misunderstood,” he said of Affleck. “Ten years ago, the public image of him could not have been farther apart from who he actually is. It was like he was being cast in a role, that he was a talentless kind of meathead, with his whole relationship with Jennifer Lopez. He just got cast as this person that he wasn’t. It was just really painful. It was painful to be his friend, because it wasn’t fair, you know? To my mind, nobody really got him at all. And through his work, he climbed from the bottom of the mountain all the way back up to the top and past where either of us had ever been.”
Affleck and Lopez famously ended their high-profile engagement in early 2004.