Minnie Driver was actually told that she wasn’t “hot enough” to appear in the hit film Good Will Hunting. In her new book titled Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays, the actress alleges that she was told this by a producer of the film and that she was devastated.
“It was devastating,” she said, speaking to The Cut. “To be told at 26 that you’re not sexy when you maybe just got over all your teenage angst and started to think, you know, ‘Maybe in the right light and the right shoes and the right dress, I’m all right.’”
Minnie Driver remembers being told she wasn’t “hot enough” to star in ‘Good Will Hunting’
However, Driver proved to be the right pick, as she earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance. “I certainly had insecurities growing up,” Driver says. “That I was not gorgeous. I was not super pretty. The idea that that was the currency I was then meant to pursue, and I was meant to try and find ways of making myself prettier. I thank God that I didn’t do a ton of stuff that I could have then gone and done. It could have been way more damaging than it was.”
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“I had such a lovely family going, ‘F— that. You’re gorgeous on all these levels. And if one person doesn’t think that you’re pretty enough, f— it,’” she adds.
This isn’t the first time Driver has shared this story. Back in 2016 during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live, she spoke about it to host Andy Cohen when she was asked about the rude comment she’d ever received in Hollywood.
“I really can’t [name names] because then I’ll never work again, and I have to work because I have a mortgage,” she said. She claims the anonymous producer “did not think I was hot enough to be in that film and did not want me in the film.” Aside from this pesky producer, both Ben Affleck and Matt Damon fought hard for her to be in the film. “I am grateful to them until this day,” she says of her co-stars.