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If you’ve been forced to share a dorm room, apartment, or house with another person (or multiple people) at some point over the course of your life, you likely have at least one experience with someone who could be described as a “Roommate From Hell.”
I personally got to experience the true joy of cohabiting with someone who fits that label in the form of a music student who decided her bedroom was the ideal place to practice violin for hours on end each night and thought it would be a good idea to invite her boyfriend to move in without bothering to inform anyone else.
However, that’s just one of the many, many ways that particular type of ilk can manifest itself.
Most people are familiar with the lengthy bromance between Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who first met as kids growing up in Boston, went to the same high school, and eventually took Hollywood by storm after Good Will Hunting put the duo on the map.
The two men may both lead a very enviable life nowadays, but it’s safe to say that wasn’t the case back when they were firmly in the “Struggling Artists” phase of their careers.
Damon once shared an apartment with Affleck and his younger brother Casey, and based on what the latter had to say during a recent appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden, the former was not the kind of guy you want to be roommates with thanks to his fairly revolting approach (or lack thereof) to cleaning.
Affleck said Damon “never paid a bill,” but that problem has nothing on another issue that led him and his brother to eventually conduct a bit of an experiment to see the level of squalor he was willing to tolerate living in
Here’s what he had to say via Rolling Stone:
“Me and my brother, after cleaning up after the guy for years, we said, ‘You know what, we’re gonna go sit-down strike.’ We’re going to wait and see how long he could go before he finally gets up and goes, ‘I’m covered in garbage.’
We went weeks—two weeks—without touching the apartment.
We came home one day to the apartment. Matt’s there in his shorts playing the ’92 SEGA hockey game in the middle of what was the living room; just surrounded by concentric circles of garbage: pizza boxes, a sushi thing that was like a week and a half old, and there’s maggots.
We were like, ‘We submit. You are too good. We cannot beat you.”
Here’s to hoping Damon has been literally able to clean up his act as he’s gotten older.