5 min learnNew YorkUp to date: Jul 2, 2026 11:26 AM IST
Scrawled in block letters on an off-white obscure wall in Harvard Sq. in Boston is a line: “Matt Damon was right here!” Excited passersby cease, howl and snap pictures and selfies from numerous angles, as if they’d found a hidden treasure. “Severely, was he actually right here?” “Or somebody wrote similar to?” Then who did? Was it Damon himself?
Like city myths, there are numerous variations. Some declare Damon, who was raised within the locale, himself wrote it. Some, in typical Bostonian wryness, would ask: “Who’s Matt Damon?” A photographer turned portrait artist, chimes in: “Effectively for those who ask me, he’s right here and in all places.” “I’m not that Hollywood-loving sort, however lots of people ask me about Matt’s favorite restaurant or bar, or the cinema,” he says.
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Damon’s mom was a professor at Cambridge, lower than a mile away from Harvard. So he grew up strolling beneath the luxuriant foliage watching big squirrels wiggling alongside the grassy tapestries and the Neo-Georgian buildings that dot its avenues.
In 1988, he enrolled at Harvard for an English main and left the establishment, simply 12 credit in need of finishing his diploma to pursue performing. However earlier than he left, he had scripted the primary act of the film that catapulted him to fame and hoarded academy awards, Good Will Looking. In a lecture at Harvard in 2013, he recollected it: “I left with this doc beneath my arm—this primary 40 pages of a screenplay.” “He [professor Anthony Kubiak] gave me a straight A and wrote on the script, ‘Don’t hand over on this. Wherever this goes, it’s going someplace. Stick to this”.”
It was not till 1994 that he accomplished the script, a few shy janitor who’s a mathematical genius, together with his shut good friend and actor Ben Affleck, additionally from Cambridge. Naturally, lots of the background is Boston and Harvard Sq.. The aged shopkeeper Antoine of the Hidden Treasures souvenirs, says curious vacationers ask him whether or not he has seen Damon. “I inform them I’ve, and it could possibly be true as a result of I’ve seen 1000’s of children right here. However I don’t bear in mind their names, or faces. After he turned well-known, I can effectively say I’ve seen him. In an interview I seen that he nonetheless retains the Boston accent,” he says. With a guffaw he provides: “Good Will Looking is just not my favorite Damon film. It’s The Departed (some components have been shot in Boston), and I’m not saying this as a result of I’m Italian (director Martin Scorsese and co-lead Leonardo Di Caprio are of Italian descent) .”
Film buffs scour the locale for Damon collectibles, a story, or simply stroll alongside. They seek for the Bow and Arrow Pub in Harvard Sq., the place Will (Damon) meets Skyler (Minnie Driver). Beside the storefront, he delivers the film’s most well-known line to his good friend Chuckie (Ben Affleck): Do you want apples? Effectively, I bought her quantity. How do you want them apples (initially a line borrowed from Jack Nicholson’s China City)?” Alas, Antoine says, the pub was shut down some time in the past. “It’s now Grafton Avenue, and so they have redone the entire place. Plenty of vacationers come right here asking for the Bows, shouting these apple traces,” he says.
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However the L Avenue Tavern within the Southie neighbourhood the place Will frequented continues to be preserved. The park bench the place Will and his professor Sean Maguire, enacted by Robin Williams, in Boston Public Backyard, has a cult following by itself. It quickly earned the identify, The Goodwill Looking Bench, too. The day Williams died, in 2014, followers of the film lit candles and put flowers on it. Film quotes and messages are inscribed on its facet.
Hollywood pilgrims go to the well-known cafe Au Bon Ache at Harvard Sq. too. Says Sarah, manning the money: “It’s type of a vacationer vacation spot, folks from each nation have come right here and requested, ‘Is it the place Good Will Looking was shot?’ And they’re tremendous excited.”
In 2013, he returned to Harvard to obtain the Harvard Artist Medal. On the finish of the speech, he stated emotionally. “Of all of the accolades or motion pictures, when anyone says my identify, they are saying the identify of this College, too, and which means quite a bit to me. I’ve at all times tried to reside my life in a method that deserved the outline of being a Harvard individual.” Because the scrawling goes: “Matt Damon was right here!” However who drew it, nobody is aware of. “Maybe it was Matt himself,” says the portrait artist, chuckling.