The Rip director Joe Carnahan on working with Ben Affleck, Matt Damon

Near the end of Joe Carnahan’s new movie The Rip, best friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck share a touching scene that, as a viewer, might make you reflect on your own lifelong bonds — especially if you, like their characters, have been through a lot of turmoil together.

On Netflix now, the action-thriller follows Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon) and Det. Sgt. JD Byrne (Affleck), two Miami police officers each navigating unimaginable loss. Together, they come across a $24 million pile of cash that leads them and their team, including Det. Mike Ro (Steven Yeun) and Det. Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor), to question everything about what (and who) they thought they knew.

Writer-director Carnahan tells Gold Derby that The Rip is based on a real raid his friend Chris Casiano was once on. “When he showed me the photographs of containers in the wall that they sledgehammered out, I went, ‘Wow,’ “ he says. “He’s like, ‘Then we have to count the seizure on site.’ In real life, you have to count it twice, and it took him 42 hours in real life to do it. I just thought there was such a cinematic [element to it] … there was so much about it that appealed to me. And I love cop movies and the cop genre. I thought, ‘OK, let’s give this one a ride.’ ”

The story within The Rip — which also stars Kyle Chandler, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Sasha Calle — has its own ties to family, as Damon’s character, based on Casiano, is dealing with the loss of his 10-year-old son Jake to cancer. The storyline is “loosely based on” Casiano’s own son, who died in 2021 of leukemia at just 11 years old.

Asked about the dedication to the real-life Jake William Casiano, shown before the rest of the credits roll at the end of the film, Carnahan says, “It’s tricky, because you gotta go to your friend and say, ‘I don’t want this to feel exploitive or cheap, and I don’t want to take advantage of the memory of your boy.’ “Instead, he presented the idea as, “ ‘Can we create a vessel with which to put this grief and sadness into, and maybe turn it into something where it’s this living monument to Jake for his short time here on Earth?’ “

“And Chris signed off, and God bless him,” the director continues. “I showed the movie to him about a month ago in Miami, and we had an absolutely bucking-sobs cry afterward; it was very cathartic and amazing. It was really important to me that [Jake] be the first name you see, because you understood that there was a beating heart at the center.”

The Rip marks Carnahan’s first time working with Damon and Affleck together. And he says they “have a normalcy” to them that fans might not expect given their talent and fame, explaining, “These are two guys that have been movie stars for decades, and they just don’t act like it.”

The Oscar winners’ nature even meant they went largely unnoticed on an outing in New York City while making The Rip. “We went bowling at Chelsea Piers when we were shooting, all of us, and the families and Matt’s kids,” Carhanan recalls. ”It wasn’t until the very end, like two hours later, that someone got wind: ‘Is that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon on the far lane?’ There’s no entourage, there’s no nothing. The way that they carry themselves, they don’t have that energy around them. … And I think it worked in our favor.”

As did Affleck’s experience behind the camera. As Carnahan praises the actor-director, whom he previously worked with 20 years ago on 2006’s Smokin’ Aces, “Ben understanding [by having directed] his own films and how important it is that the actor be a collaborative, helpful apparatus versus something working against the process is huge.”

He further raves of “extraordinary filmmaker” Affleck, “I think he got robbed for that Best Director [Oscar] for Argo.” As for Damon, Carnahan tells Gold Derby he’s a longtime friend and calls him “just an angel” of a person, adding, ”He has the greatest Hollywood stories you’ve ever heard. He’s endlessly entertaining and amiable and affable.”

That attitude was in full swing on set of The Rip — for example, when Carnahan offered to “wrap” a scene Damon was in and use inserts for close-ups of his character’s hands. “He’s like, ‘No man, this is what they’re paying me for. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine,’ “ the director says. “When you get that from the guys at the top of the call sheet, it makes it easy for everybody else to draft off that energy and go, ‘We’re all here for the common good’; it’s an egoless process. And I think the movie is as good as it is because it was spared unnecessary, egotistical bulls—.”

Another ingredient that ramped up The Rip’s screen presence? “Superstar” Taylor, who recently nabbed the Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe for her performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Carnahan — who has seen the actress in person since her big win, where he offered her his congratulations — knew she was right for the part of Numa in The Rip from their first 45-minute meeting.

“We had this wonderful lunch and she was very emotionally open and shared these things with me, because she was having one of those days. We just started talking about being parents, the difficulties of divorce — a lot of things that you normally wouldn’t relegate to a first meeting,” Carnahan says. “And I just fell in love with her. … She’s one of those people you look at and go, ‘Oh, that’s a movie star.’ Whatever the base ingredients are for the cake that bakes into a movie star, she’s got it all. And the success she’s had, I’m so happy for her, and she deserves all of it.”

The Rip is the latest collaboration for Damon and Affleck, who won their first Oscar jointly: in 1998, for their Good Will Hunting screenplay. The Gus Van Sant-directed drama was nominated for nine Academy Awards total, also clinching Best Supporting Actor for Robin Williams. Affleck later won his second Oscar, for Best Picture, for his 2012 political thriller Argo.

Nearly three decades later, the pair’s production company Artists Equity, founded in 2022, has added The Rip to its rich slate of features, which has also included Air (2023), The Instigators (2024), and Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025). Some recent titles have included Damon’s wife, Luciana Damon, as a co-producer. And she was on the set of The Rip  “all the time,” according to Carnahan, who calls her a “wonderful woman” and raves about the spouses’ longtime bond.

He recalls, “Matt said something to me when we were shooting … we were talking about fame and stardom and it being [put] upon him at a pretty early age … [he said], ‘I made a decision a long time ago that I would not allow fame or stardom or whatever that was to affect the primary relationships in my life.’ And he stuck to that. And that’s a hell of a goal to set for yourself.”

While The Rip has no shortage of action and high-thrill sequences, Carnahan says that at its core, “The small moments and more human aspects of it — that’s the stuff that I like. The action and the twists and turns, I love that too, but it’s the little things that, to me, make that movie.”