Before Nationwide punched everyone in the heart with their “dead kid” ad, they treated us to a much more delightful commercial featuring the fabulous Mindy Kaling. The ad, entitled “Invisible Mindy” and promoted with the #InvisibleMindy hashtag, was teased ahead of the Super Bowl, but cut off right before revealing a very famous face: Matt Damon.
But this isn’t just funny because it’s Kaling thinking Damon can’t see her — this is actually an incredibly cute callback to a very early point in Kaling’s career. Before she started The Mindy Project and right before she landed a gig on The Office, Kaling was a part of New York’s budding comedy scene, performing and writing her own material. She interned for Conan O’Brien when he was at NBC and took other odd jobs in and out of television while maintaining a blog and doing standup. But what put her on the map was a 2003 Off-Broadway show called Matt & Ben, about — you probably already guessed this — Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. More specifically, how they wrote Good Will Hunting together before they became huge stars.
When I saw Kaling try to make her not-invisible move on Damon, I wondered if she had played him in her show. She actually played Affleck, which made this commercial the second time she’s worked opposite “Matt Damon.” Her best friend Brenda Withers, with whom she co-wrote the play, was Damon. She revealed on Today last year that she wanted to play Affleck because she had a crush on him and that she’d only recently met him at an awards show.
But it wasn’t a crush that inspired the play. By 2003, Damon and Affleck were household names after winning their Oscar for writing Good Will Hunting in 1998 and starring in blockbusters like Saving Private Ryan, Armageddon, The Bourne Identity, and Pearl Harbor. Kaling and Withers would have improvised conversations as Affleck and Damon just to amuse themselves, not really knowing much about either actor. (Though they’re all Boston natives, so basically this was fate.) That turned into a play about genderbent versions of two struggling unknowns who magically find the script to an Oscar-worthy screenplay after it falls from the sky.
Here is a particularly entertaining clip from Matt & Ben. There are several more on YouTube.
Matt & Ben was definitely a star-maker for Kaling, who was hired to write and act on The Office just a year later. She quickly became a co-producer, received some Emmy nominations for her writing, then left for her own project. The rest, as we know, is history — history that culminates in Mindy Kaling coming face-to-face with the real Matt Damon, even if it doesn’t go as well as planned.
