The protagonist of the movie Good Will Hunting, which was released in December of 1997, was a young man from South Boston named Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon).
Will Hunting saw “nothing wrong with spending his whole life hanging out with his friends, quaffing a few beers, holding down a blue-collar job.”
The problem? He was also a self-taught mathematical genius with a photographic memory.
So several people in his life — including his best friend Chuckie (Ben Affleck), his psychotherapist Sean (Robin Williams), and his girlfriend Skylar (Minnie Driver) — pushed him to rise above his troubled past and embrace his gifts. As Chuckie put it, Will was “sitting on a winning lottery ticket” — he just had to find the courage to cash it in.
Good Will Hunting became one of the highest-grossing films of 1998. It also won a pair of Academy Awards: one for Best Supporting Actor (Williams), the other for Best Original Screenplay (Damon and Affleck).
So how did the movie affect the baby name charts?
The usage of Will, which was the only name used to refer to the main character (i.e., he was never called William), increased in 1998:
- 2000: 447 baby boys named Will [rank: 510th]
- 1999: 422 baby boys named Will [rank: 506th]
- 1998: 339 baby boys named Will [rank: 578th]
- 1997: 268 baby boys named Will [rank: 634th]
- 1996: 280 baby boys named Will [rank: 622nd]
And the slow rise of Skylar for baby girls accelerated noticeably the same year:
| Girls named Skylar | Boys named Skylar | |
| 2000 | 2,503 [rank: 135th] | 748 [rank: 356th] |
| 1999 | 2,513 [rank: 131st] | 695 [rank: 374th] |
| 1998 | 1,731 [rank: 173rd] | 730 [rank: 358th] |
| 1997 | 953 [rank: 302nd] | 657 [rank: 372nd] |
| 1996 | 855 [rank: 328th] | 636 [rank: 373rd] |
(The names Wil, Skyler, and Skyla also saw higher usage in 1998.)
Matt Damon wrote the first draft of the script for Good Will Hunting while attending Harvard College in the early ’90s. He based the character of Skylar, a pre-med student at Harvard, on his then-girlfriend, Skylar Satenstein, a former pre-med student at Harvard. (She’d since become a med student at Columbia.)
Incidentally, Satenstein went on the marry Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich (son of Torben Ulrich) in early 1997. Later the same year, Lars and Skylar attended the local premiere of Good Will Hunting together in New York City.
P.S. The movie was shot during the spring of 1997, which overlapped with the end of my own freshman year at Harvard. I remember other students saying they’d spotted a film crew in the area during those months.
Sources:
- Good Will Hunting – Wikipedia
- Good Will Hunting review – Roger Ebert
- Nicolaou, Elena. “The Surprising True Story Behind Good Will Hunting.” Refinery29 5 Dec. 2017.
- List of 1998 box office number-one films in the United States – Wikipedia
- SSA
Image: Screenshot of Good Will Hunting