Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's friendship has evolved

Matt Damon, right, and Ben Affleck at Venice Film Festival
Matt Damon has spoken about his decades-long friendship with Ben Affleck. -AP

Matt Damon's friendship with Ben Affleck has survived "different phases" in their lives.

The 55-year-old actor has been friends with Affleck, 53, since childhood and their relationship has evolved over the decades.

Damon - who has been married to his wife Luciana since 2005 - told People "the circumstances of our lives have changed a lot".

"Obviously we've gone through different phases of life, having kids, so those things are vastly different but I feel like who we are as people was kind of established together a long time ago in our adolescence and teens and those things have been pretty consistent," he said.

The pair recently confirmed that they've struck a deal with Netflix to boost pay for all crew members on their police drama The Rip.

The Hollywood duo star in and produce the Netflix film, and they struck a first-of-its-kind deal with the streaming platform to ensure that the behind-the-scenes team profit from the movie's potential success.

"In our experience, every single person that works on this movie - it's the most collaborative of all art forms. Everybody is vital to it," Affleck told Variety.

Under the terms of their deal, all 1200 people involved in the production will receive a bonus if the film performs well on Netflix.

Damon says "every single person who worked on it should benefit from it".

Prior to that, Damon claimed cinemagoers weren't aware "of how much power they have".

The friends helped to finance the drama movie, Small Things Like These, through their Artists Equity company, and Damon suggested that it represented a sea change in the context of modern cinema.

"In the '90s there would've been a number of films of this scale. There would've been a number of these every year, and they've been decreasing, obviously, over the years," Damon told Extra in 2024.

"The only way to remedy that is to make these films and to put them in theatres and for movie goers to go support them. I think people might not be aware of how much power they have as movie goers. If people go and see it, we can make more of them."