Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon are the cover “boys” for the November issue of Men’s Journal, to promote their film Hereafter (Matt stars, Clint directs). The article and Q&A is affectionate, and you can tell that the two men like each other a great deal. The writer even goes so far as to say that Matt’s the “favorite son” of tough-guy Clint. Here are some excerpts:

Clint Eastwood, tall and silvery and calm, with thinning hair that’s grown flyaway, is dressed in a pair of securely belted dark slacks and an immaculate white golf shirt. He crosses the lobby of a Toronto hotel, headed toward a table near the bar. At 80 and past concealing that fact, he looks like the wise old blue-eyed patriarch of an alternative-history America that has never lost a war or run a deficit. He comes off like a man with few worries and few regrets who lives by the Spartan motto “Get on with it” and has learned to dismiss his animal needs. When a nervous waiter sidles up to ask him what he’d like to drink, he answers gently, “Nothing, thank you.” Is there something he’d like to eat, perhaps? There isn’t.

Across the table from Eastwood, drinking coffee, sits his friend Matt Damon. He’s half Eastwood’s age and perhaps two-thirds his height, but he shares some of the old master’s famed tenacity. He’s also, as Eastwood used to be, an action hero with a brain who harbors long-term plans to use it by making movies of substance and integrity. In a show of affection rare in nature between alpha males, the two men greet each other with broad, sweet grins that even trained actors would have trouble faking.

They’re cute together.

Damon on how they met: “We met in a bar, a gay bar. I saw something in him through the eye slits of the Hannibal Lecter mask that he was wearing.”

Damon on The Departed, and on tough guys: “I went up to Marty [Scorsese] and said, ‘I want to lose every fight I’m in and I don’t want my dick to work.’ Anybody I’ve met in my life who really is tough, there’s no swagger, there’s no raising your voice. You sit down and talk to a guy from the Delta Force, it’s very pleasant and calm.”

Eastwood on Damon: “You get a feeling about somebody that they’re the kind of person who just likes to stand and deliver. And he is. He knows – he instinctively knows [what it takes to be a good director]. When he directs he’s going to be great at it because he understands actors.”

[From Men’s Journal]

Although it seems like a strange pairing, I can totally see how Clint and Matt are tight now, although I think writers are stretching the father-son likeness a bit. Matt has done some great action work, notably in the Bourne series, but he’ll never be quite as badass and lovely as Clint. That’s not a bad thing, though – because I can’t think of anyone who will ever be as badass as Clint.

Photos courtesy of Men’s Journal.