Matt Damon has carried a moment with him for nearly 30 years. It was the very first day of filming *Good Will Hunting*. He and Ben Affleck weren’t even working that day; they simply showed up on set and sat off to the side of the camera to watch Robin Williams rehearse. Two young men from Cambridge who had spent five years fighting to get the movie made.
By the time someone called action, tears were already falling down Matt’s face. When the scene ended, Robin walked over, saw the tears, and put his hand on their heads. “It’s not a fluke. You guys really did this.
You really did it,” he told them. That memory has now come full circle. In April 2026, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are being honored together with the ninth Robin Williams Legacy of Laughter Award. The award will be presented at a sold-out fundraising event in San Francisco hosted by Bring Change to Mind, the mental health nonprofit founded by Glenn Close.
The ceremony takes place at the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, a few miles from the neighborhood where Robin Williams lived and worked. The award will be placed in their hands by Robin’s own children, Zak, Zelda, and Cody Williams. In their joint statement ahead of the ceremony, Matt and Ben said, “Robin wasn’t just someone we admired. He made our dreams come true.
We owe everything to him. He said yes to our movie and we got it made. ” They added, “Receiving the Legacy of Laughter Award created in honor of Robin Williams is incredibly meaningful to us. His legacy isn’t just about his talent and how much he made the world laugh.
It’s about how deeply he cared. ”
The road to that moment began long before the cameras rolled. Matt Damon was born on October 8, 1970, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents divorced when he was two, and he moved with his mother Nancy, a professor of early childhood education at Lesley University, and his older brother Kyle into a six-family communal house in Central Square.
Money was often tight, but Matt has said he always felt rich in other ways, thanks to good teachers, a remarkable older brother, and a mother who made him feel that what was inside his head mattered more than what was inside anyone’s wallet. As a teenager, he has been honest about feeling lonely and unsure of his place. He attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and threw himself into drama with an intensity that signaled he had found his calling. When he was 10 years old, a kid moved in two blocks down the road.
His name was Ben Affleck. They played baseball, played Dungeons and Dragons, and went to the movies together. Other students called them drama geeks, but they had each other and a shared dream. Matt enrolled at Harvard as an English major, but kept skipping classes to audition.
During his final year, he wrote a 40-page script for a playwriting class about a young man from South Boston, a janitor, a secret genius who couldn’t let himself be known. He dropped out of Harvard just 12 credits short of graduation and went to Los Angeles. He showed the script to Ben, and the two spent the next five years rewriting it, showing it to producers and directors, and being told no so many times that the word almost stopped meaning anything. They inserted deliberately outrageous scenes into the script just to see if anyone was actually reading it.
They insisted, over every objection, that they had to play the lead roles themselves. The script eventually made its way to Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, who saw its potential under conditions. Then something happened that changed everything. A copy reached Robin Williams.
Robin had heard about the project through Francis Ford Coppola and received the pages from director Gus Van Sant. He read them and said yes. Matt has been direct about this in every interview since. It was Robin Williams’ interest, and then his commitment, that finally got the whole thing made.
The studio had been cautious about two unknown actors insisting they star in their own movie, but the moment Robin attached his name, the math changed. Weinstein moved forward, Van Sant was hired, and the cameras started rolling. Robin had also negotiated something that revealed how clearly he understood the script’s potential. He took a smaller upfront fee than he could have demanded, but built in an escalating participation deal.
He would start earning a percentage of the profits once the film crossed $60 million at the box office. It ended up grossing more than $225 million worldwide. Matt has said over and over that he has never seen anyone like Robin on a film set. Take after take, Robin gave something different, always inventive, always alive to new possibilities in the material.
Matt has called him one of the hardest working people he ever encountered, not the effortless genius the public image suggested, but someone absolutely tenacious. “He just was exploding with ideas and creative energy,” Matt said in a 2024 interview. “And he was really, really kind to everybody. ”
There is a scene in *Good Will Hunting* that has become one of the most recognized moments in American cinema: the park bench scene, where Sean Maguire tells Will Hunting quietly and without flinching, “It’s not your fault.
” Matt has described watching Robin film that scene and thinking simply, “This is going to be really good. ” The scene belonged entirely to Robin. But there was another moment on that set Matt has told with particular delight. During a scene in the therapist’s office, Robin went completely off script and improvised a warm, funny, unexpectedly tender story about his character’s wife.
In the middle of it, he landed a specific line that Matt has described as making him grab director Gus Van Sant by the shoulders in disbelief. “He stole my line,” Matt said laughing. The improvised moment ended up in the final film. That performance won Robin Williams his only Academy Award.
The film earned nine nominations at the 1998 Oscars. Robin won Best Supporting Actor. Matt and Ben won Best Original Screenplay. At 27 years old, Matt Damon stood on the most famous stage in cinema with his best friend and accepted the prize for a script he had started writing in a Harvard playwriting class.
What Matt has never stopped returning to across nearly three decades is not the award, but the man who made the whole thing possible. Matt has described watching Robin notice in the middle of a long shooting day when the cast and crew were starting to flag, and launching, without anyone asking, into 15 minutes of live stand-up comedy just for the room. Matt has said it was the best stand-up he had ever seen, delivered privately to a group of tired people who walked away laughing so hard they could barely breathe. “I couldn’t have asked for a better role model,” Matt said later.
After *Good Will Hunting*, Matt’s career took off in every direction. He starred in *Saving Private Ryan*, *Rounders*, *The Talented Mr. Ripley*, and the *Oceans* franchise. He married Luciana Barroso in 2005, and they built a family together with four daughters.
Through it all, Robin Williams stayed with him. Matt has talked about taking his family, years after Robin’s death, to Boston Common, to the actual park bench where the famous scene was filmed, just to sit there. On August 11, 2014, Robin Williams died at his home in Paradise Cay, California. He was 63 years old.
The cause was suicide. It was later revealed he had been suffering from Lewy body dementia, a devastating neurological disease that had gone undiagnosed while he was alive. Matt’s statement in the hours after Robin’s death was quiet and unadorned. “Robin brought so much joy into my life and I will carry that joy with me forever,” he said.
“He was such a beautiful man. I was lucky to know him and I will never, ever forget him. ”
In a conversation with fans on Reddit, he wrote that Robin was one of the most generous, loving, wonderful people he had ever met. He described the afternoons of impromptu stand-up and said, “I’ll never be able to thank him enough for what he gave us.
In my heart, that’s where he is, as this person that I’m deeply, deeply grateful came into my life and changed it for the better. ”
The gratitude has not softened with time. It has sharpened. Now, in April 2026, standing in San Francisco, accepting an award from Robin’s own children, Matt Damon is finally telling that truth in full.
Some debts you can never fully repay, but you can show up. You can stand in the room. You can take what someone’s children place in your hands and let them see in your face that their father’s kindness is still alive in someone he touched all these years later.
