Matt Damon knows you’re going to be thinking about his friendship with Ben Affleck as you watch the two actors trade barbs in The Rip. “It’s about two old friends who suddenly can’t trust each other,” he told Krista Smith on a new episode of Skip Intro. “People know us as friends, and so we kind of carry that baggage into the roles.”

Damon and Affleck’s friendship has been in the public eye since the beginning of their careers. The pair burst onto the Hollywood scene in the late 1990s, when they won Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards for Good Will Hunting. Affleck remains the youngest winner in the category, but Damon is happy to share that spotlight. “I like to say we’re the two youngest,” Damon said with a laugh.

Good Will Hunting, the defining success of Damon’s early career, emerged out of a moment of failure for the young actor. “It was actually the movie Primal Fear that was kind of our epiphany,” he said. “I got a dialect coach with money I barely had. I really worked hard on this audition, and Edward Norton got it. He was terrific in the movie, [but] that was when Ben and I went, ‘Well, we gotta just write this thing. That’s the only way we're going to get good roles.’ ”

Matt Damon Talks The Rip, Boston Sports, and More on Skip Intro

It worked. Damon’s resume is now full of good roles: the amnesiac spy Jason Bourne, Ocean’s pickpocket Linus Caldwell, The Martian astronaut Mark Watney, and his most recent role as Lieutenant Dane Dumars in Joe Carnahan’s The Rip. Damon prepared diligently for the role, even going to Miami to see how the police department operated. “We went and did ride-alongs with Chris Casiano, the character who my character’s based on,” he said. “You want to try to get that feeling. There’s a certain way these guys hang out together.”

Of course, The Rip’s team camaraderie is short-lived. When Dumars, Detective Sergeant J.D. Byrne (Affleck), and the rest of their tactical narcotics team uncover $20 million in cash in a cartel safe house, trust becomes a commodity that’s hard to come by. “Catalina Sandino Moreno’s character says it at one point: ‘I get 80 grand a year after taxes, and I get shot at, I get spit on, and your own department doesn’t trust you’ ,” Damon said. “It’s about, basically, how strong is your ethical framework?”

You’ll have to watch The Rip to find out. Tune into the full episode of Skip Intro to hear Damon talk about his new position as CCO and co-founder of Artists Equity, his upcoming role as the ultimate hero in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and of course, those viral clips of Affleck’s fluent Spanish.