Matt Damon And Ben Affleck Almost Kissed In Their New Movie

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck haven’t written a movie together since the Oscar winning 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. They’re back though, and instead of writing a Good Will Hunting 2, they went in a different direction.

The pair’s new movie, helmed by Ridley Scott, is set in 1300s France and centers around a fatal duel between Damon’s Sir Jean de Carrouges, a French Knight, and Affleck’s Pierre d’Alençon, a French nobleman. It’s called The Last Duel.

The pair wanted the movie to be historically accurate so they wrote a scene that mimicked customs from that era. In the script, the two actors wrote a scene during a ceremony where Damon kissed Affleck on the lips.

“In the original actual version of that scene — the way that ceremony actually took place was that you kissed everybody on the mouth. And we had that in the script.”

Affleck to Entertainment Weekly

“That would’ve been our first on screen kiss,” Damon said.

“It’s going to have to wait,” Affleck said.

Apparently director Scott thought the kiss would be too distracting and would take away from the movie.

“Ridley thought it would be distracting, and his instincts are pretty good,” Affleck said.

The idea was to heighten the tension between the characters by forcing Damon to show some respect to Affleck.

“Yeah the two characters really hate each other and that was really fun. In fact, the scene where I kneel before him, Ben just improvised this thing where I started to say my line and he just interrupted me and goes, ‘Closer.’ And I have to kind of get up and kneel again in front of him. And that was just — he just did that and just kind of blurted that out, and it wasn’t in the script.”

The Last Duel comes out on October 15th. It also stars Adam Driver and Jodie Comer.