The plot is almost too good to be true: a kid from Cambridge gets into Harvard, does homework in English class, and writes an essay in the form of a film treatment. That homework turns out to win him an Academy Award. But that’s pretty much what happened with Matt Damon. The longer you think about it, the less like a fairy tale it seems and more like the result of someone who was always paying close attention.
Even though he moved away from Cambridge, Massachusetts, many things about him still make him feel like he was born there. The city changed him. After his parents got divorced, he grew up in a house with six other families. He went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and, according to him, felt like an outsider as a teenager because he didn’t quite fit in. He had a mother named Nancy Carlsson-Paige who taught early childhood education at Lesley University. His dad worked as a stockbroker. It’s interesting how discipline and creativity, or structure and creativity, can work together. You can see how Damon built his career over time.
He started at Harvard in 1988 as a member of the class of 1992 and lived in Lowell House. He was taking English classes and acting in student plays, which is what ambitious young men do at that kind of school. In the background, though, something else was going on. Damon wrote an essay in one of his English classes that was set up like a film treatment. It was the beginning of Good Will Hunting. It’s not clear if he knew at the time that the seed was that important. He might have thought he was still doing his work.
It’s not just the screenplay story that makes the Harvard chapter interesting. It’s the way it feels. Jackson and Damon were in the same drama class. Jackson would go on to become a Supreme Court Justice. Gregory Nagy, a well-known classicist, taught him about the Ancient Greek Hero. He was a part of one of Harvard’s Final Clubs, the Delphic Club. These details don’t show that the person is sleepwalking through college; instead, they show that the person is interested in the world, language, and people.
After that, he left. In 1992, twelve credits short of getting his Bachelor of Arts, Damon left for Los Angeles to be in the movie Geronimo: An American Legend. He thought it would be a big step forward. It wasn’t. But the fact that he chose to leave when he did, chasing something unknown over something certain, shows how he was wired.
The screenplay he started at Harvard turned into a real project he worked on with Ben Affleck, a childhood friend and classmate from Cambridge Rindge and Latin. In the early 1990s, they lived together in Affleck’s apartment in Los Angeles and used improvised scenes to shape a story that took place in part in their hometown. They sold it, had creative disagreements, and had to work things out so that it went to a different studio. When Good Will Hunting came out in 1997, the rest of the awards came quickly after: an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and instant fame after eleven years of hard work.
In the end, Harvard recognized him. The university gave Damon the Harvard Arts Medal in 2013 as a sign that what he had built was important, even though he didn’t have a degree. That gives me a quiet sense of satisfaction, even though Damon has never seemed very interested in being righted.
Matt Damon’s college story isn’t really about dropping out. It’s about the things you take with you when you leave—the questions you were asked in class, the friends you made in the hallways, and the essay you wrote because you had to, not because you thought it would matter. He used some of what Harvard taught him to make a living. The rest looks like he’s still having to carry.
