Read for 5 minutesNew YorkUpdated: July 2, 2026 11:26 AM IST
On an off-white obscured wall in Boston’s Harvard Square is a line scrawled in block letters: “Matt Damon was here!” Excited travelers stop, shout and take pictures and selfies from various angles, as if they have found a hidden treasure. “Seriously, was he really here?” “Or has someone written something like that?” So who did? Was it Damon himself?
As with urban myths, there are various versions. Some claim that Damon, who grew up in the locale, wrote it himself. Some, in typical Bostonian fashion, will ask: “Who is Matt Damon?” A photographer turned portrait artist, he voices: “Well, if you ask me, it’s here and everywhere.” “I’m not the Hollywood-loving type, but a lot of people ask me about Matt’s favorite restaurants or bars or movies,” he says.
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Damon’s mother was a professor at Cambridge, a mile away from Harvard. So he grew up walking under the luxuriant foliage, watching the grassy tapestry and giant squirrels scurrying along the Neo-Georgian buildings that dotted his path.
In 1988, he enrolled at Harvard for an English major and left the institution just 12 credits short of graduating to pursue acting. But before he left, he had written the screenplay for the first act of the film that brought him fame and a collection of Academy Awards, Good Will Hunting. In a lecture at Harvard in 2013, he recalled it: “I had this document under my arm – these first 40 pages of the screenplay.” “He [professor Anthony Kubiak] Gave me straight A’s and wrote on the script, ‘Don’t drop this. It goes anywhere, it’s going somewhere. stick to it””
By 1994 he had completed the script, a shy janitor who is a mathematical genius, his close friend and actor Ben Affleck, also from Cambridge. Naturally, much of the background is Boston and Harvard Square. Antony, an elderly shopkeeper of Hidden Treasures souvenirs, says curious tourists ask him if he has seen Damon. “I tell them I have, and it may be true because I’ve seen thousands of guys here. But I don’t remember their names, or their faces. After he became famous, I could say I’d seen him. In an interview I noticed he still had a Boston accent,” he says. Good Will Hunting is not my favorite Demon movie. It’s The Departed (parts were shot in Boston), and I’m not saying that because I’m Italian (director Martin Scorsese and co-lead Leonardo DiCaprio are of Italian descent).”
The movies are fun Damon collectibles, a story, or just moving along. They find the Bow and Arrow Pub in Harvard Square, where Will (Damon) meets Skyler (Minnie Driver). At the side of the storefront, he delivers the film’s most famous line to his friend Chucky (Ben Affleck): Do you like apples? Well, I got her number. How do you like those apples (a line originally taken from Jack Nicholson’s China Town)?” Alas, says Antony, the pub closed some time ago. “Now it’s Grafton Street and they’ve redone the whole place. A lot of tourists come here to ask for a bow, to shout those apple lines,” he says.
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But the L Street Tavern in the Southy neighborhood that Will frequented is still preserved. Will and his professor Sean Maguire, created by Robin Williams in the Boston Public Garden, have a cult following in the park bench of its own. It soon acquired the name The Goodwill Hunting Bench. On the day Williams died in 2014, fans of the film lit candles and laid flowers on him. Movie quotes and messages are engraved on its sides.
Hollywood pilgrims also visit the famous Cafe Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. Sarah, who handles cash, says: “It’s kind of a tourist spot, people come from all over the country and ask, ‘Is this where Good Will Hunting was filmed?’ And they are very excited.”
In 2013, he returned to Harvard to receive the Harvard Artist Medal. He became emotional at the end of the speech. “Of all the accolades or movies, when someone says my name, they also say the name of this university, and that means a lot to me. I’ve always tried to live my life in a way that deserves to be described as a Harvard person.” As the scrawling: “Matt Damon was here!” But no one knows who drew it. “Maybe it was Matt himself,” says the portrait artist with a smile.