Matt Damon Hopes Robin Williams Is Honored with 'Good Will Hunting Statue' in Boston Garden: 'The Coolest Idea'

Matt Damon is hoping Robin Williams may one day be immortalized in Boston.

While Damon, 53, and his costar Casey Affleck, 48, spoke with journalist Jake Hamilton in footage shared on YouTube recently about their new movie The Instigators, the actor noted that he recently learned of an artist’s pitch to place a bronze statue of the late Williams, who died at 63 in August 2014, in Boston’s Public Garden.

“I don’t know if it will happen, but I really hope it does. Someone proposed to us an artist to do a bronze statue of Robin and permanently put it there, and the idea being that if you feel alone you can go sit next to him, which I think is the coolest idea,” Damon said.

The proposed statue would stand next to a bench in the city’s park where Damon and Williams filmed one of the most poignant scenes in 1997’s Good Will Hunting, which earned Williams an Academy Award for his performance as psychologist Sean Maguire. The movie also helped launch Damon and Ben Affleck’s careers and resulted in the duo winning an Oscar for writing the movie’s screenplay.

“It would be the most beautiful installation and such a tribute to that guy, who I think would have loved that,” Damon said of the proposed plans. “Anyway, I just heard about this like a month ago. I really hope it comes to pass, I hope they let this artist do it because it would be pretty cool.”

As Boston.com reported at the time of Williams’ death in 2014, fans of the film and the late actor turned the unmarked bench from that Good Will Hunting scene into a makeshift memorial after he died. A petition to create a bronze statue of Williams at that site was made in 2014 and remains active today, though it is unclear whether it is the same pitch Damon referred to in his interview.

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More than 26 years after that movie was released, Damon still remembers working with Williams fondly, as he told Hamilton in that interview.

“Robin was off-book in pre-production, which was nuts, because that monologue was like two pages long, and I don’t say anything in that scene — just at the very top — and then he goes into that thing,” he recalled of filming the moment. “I remember rehearsing it with him and I was off book because we wrote it, but he just put his script down. . . and Ben and I kind of looked at each other like, ‘This is going to be amazing.’ “

Damon and Affleck’s new movie The Instigators releases on Apple TV+ on Friday, Aug. 9.