Ben Affleck and Matt Damon Debunk Casey Affleck's Good Will Hunting Audition Claim: 'Everything About That Story Is Untrue'

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck say that Casey Affleck's claim he was forced to audition for his role in their 1997 film Good Will Hunting is "a bold-face lie."

In an interview with Deadline, the longtime friends and actors responded to Casey's statement from an earlier interview, in which Casey said that the two made him audition for his role in the film, even after he put the wheels in motion to getting it made.

"I was going to school when Ben and Matt ... said, 'Hey can you please get this script to Gus Van Sant?' " Casey, 49, told Deadline in July of how the duo initially got their script in front of the legendary director (with whom Casey worked on the 1995 film To Die For).

After Van Sant said he wanted to make the film, Casey told Deadline that Ben and Matt "sort of badgered me in" to appearing in the film.

"So I went and auditioned for it. They were badgering me into doing it, and then asked me to come in and audition, which I thought was — I'll never stop making fun of them for that," Casey said.

Elsewhere in the interview, Casey claimed that Ben, now 52, and Matt, now 54, were "sitting behind the camera in the casting office, making me read."

But the story, Ben and Matt say, is false.

"That is a bold-face lie," Matt said, adding, "Everything about that story is untrue."

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"When you hear a story like that, usually you go, 'Oh, I see what he’s saying,' but there’s nothing about that story that’s rooted in truth," Ben added of his brother's earlier claim. "I don’t know where to start."

He continued: "First of all, we wrote the part for Casey. He knew it the whole time. There was no audition. Oh my God. Yeah. I don’t know why he says what he says sometimes. I think he’s just an inveterate prankster."

Ben and Matt have a friendship that dates back to their childhood when they bonded over their shared love for acting and baseball. The two began acting in movies in the late 1980s and ultimately won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting, in which they costarred.