Kevin Costner Tells About Meeting Matt Damon and Ben Affleck When They Were Extras on Set of FIELD OF DREAMS

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have famously been best friends since they were teenagers. They began acting in high school, and went on to follow their dreams out to California, where they started acting and writing, with their careers taking off side by side, and the rest is history.

But one of their lesser known early projects is when they appeared as extras in the 1989 fan-favorite film Field of Dreams, starring one of their acting idols, Kevin Costner.

Costner recently appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to discuss his new film project, Horizon: An American Saga, and when talking about his career and the films he’s made that have had the most impact, Kimmel brought up Field of Dreams.

He mentioned that Affleck and Damon were extras on the film when they were teenagers, and asked if Costner remembered meeting them. Costner recalled:

“I did remember it. They were sitting in the stands, like college guys, and they came up, and they both leaned in at the same time, leaned back at the same time, looked at each other at the same time when we talked. And they had these… big enthusiasm. They were on fire. I do remember them, absolutely.”

They were fans at heart, not just of Costner’s, but of the whole filmmaking process. They were excited to be making their way into the field, and it clearly paid off. Kimmel then reached out to his frenemy Matt Damon to get his perspective on meeting Costner that day, and Damon said:

“I remember it well. I literally had an ‘Untouchables’ poster on my wall… He, being you, came out and hung around with the extras between setups. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ‘Shooting the shit,’ and I laughed like a 12-year-old girl… It was a big deal for us, because he had the exact career that we wanted. He was very nice to us.”

It’s cool that they got to meet a hero of theirs, and he met their expectations and even showed them that big movie stars could just be normal guys.