The story of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, two friends from Boston who broke into Hollywood together, is one of the great modern Hollywood stories. The pair have been through a lot together, and this week (if you have a Netflix subscription) you can see them together again in the new drama, The Rip. One place you apparently won’t see them together, however, is the gym.
In a new video for Netflix, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck answered questions about their friendship, their careers, and their new film. One asked them about how often the two, who play cops in The Rip, hit the gym. While we’re used to actors having to get in a particular shape to play certain roles, it turns out this was not one of those roles, as Affleck said…
How often did we hit the gym together for The Rip? What was training like? We actually didn’t really go to the gym.
In The Rip, Affleck and Damon play two members of a team of Miami cops who find a large stash of cash and decide to keep it for themselves. One might expect that a role like that would mean working with personal trainers, but hey, not all cops are in great shape.
Of course, Affleck’s comment that they “didn’t really” go to the gym might indicate that they did go to the gym a little. Matt Damon followed up with a much more declarative statement that it just did not happen. He said…
Not at all.
It was probably nice for Matt Damon that he didn’t have to go to the gym for The Rip, because he went through a much more significant transformation for his upcoming movie with Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey. Damon says he slimmed down to a lean but strong weight that he hasn’t seen since high school, and while personal trainers were involved, the actor credits cutting gluten out of his diet for a big part of his weight loss.
Affleck has also done his share of working out for movies. In Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Affleck had to do some pretty incredible workouts on screen. He really had to be in great shape to pull that off.
Honestly, both Ben Affleck and Matt Damon look to be in pretty decent shape, though this video was likely filmed fairly recently, after Damon’s Odyssey prep. Still, Ben Affleck had the perfect joke to reference the shape he and his friend were in during filming. It’s a new twist on the “dad bod” that many celebrities are known for. I hope we all start using. Affleck quipped…
The answer is none. It’s not a dad bod, it’s a father figure. Someone told me that.
As somebody else who also has a “father figure,” I appreciate this comment and will now be using this term whenever the topic arises.
