Many celebrities may prefer going about their business without getting recognized or having iconic lines quoted back at them, but according to a recent TikTok, there is at least one celebrity who seemed to have gotten annoyed after the opposite happened.
In a video uploaded this week, TikToker @jillybees recalled a celebrity encounter while working at what she described as a “Boston tourist trap.” A young woman approached her and a colleague and asked about the origins of the phrase “wicked smart” after seeing it on one of the T-shirts being sold at the store.
“We get that question from tourists all the time, so we say just like, inside joke about Boston accents,” she said.
But the man at the other side of the store wanted @jillybees to give a more specific answer about where the phrase came from. Even after repeating the explanation about Boston accents, the man prompted her about which movie the phrase came from. It took a couple of seconds, but the answer eventually came to @jillybees after the man insisted that he said the phrase, the hint about the movie, along with the woman telling him, “Casey, stop.”
@jillybees celebrity sighting in cambridge, ma. lmao #fyp #boston #wickedsmaht #celebritysighting #caseyaffleck #pathetic ♬ Monkeys Spinning Monkeys – Kevin MacLeod & Kevin The Monkey
The answer that the man was looking for was the acclaimed 1997 drama Good Will Hunting. And she says the man who wanted her to say that the phrase came from Good Will Hunting was none other than Casey Affleck, who appears in the movie (which was co-written by and costarring his brother Ben) as Morgan O’Mally and utters the sentence “My boy’s wicked smart” during a bar scene.
He further asked @jillybees and her colleague how old they were, pointed out that the phrase came from a movie around 25 years ago, and inquired about how popular Good Will Hunting is in Boston. And all the while, the other woman—apparently Affleck’s girlfriend Caylee Cowan—is trying to get Affleck to stop and to just “let it go.”
“He was very clearly upset that we didn’t know who he was,” she said.
Commenters were incredulous about Affleck seemingly inventing the phrase “wicked smart.”
“Does he think he’s the first person to have said wicked smart?” one person commented.
“Acting like he invented the phrase,” another wrote. “My nana from Boston has sarcastically called me ‘Wicked Smart’ since I was a kid in the 90’s.”
According to Boston Magazine, the use of the word “wicked” as a synonym for “very” did occur decades before 1997. But Good Will Hunting likely popularized the phrase “wicked smart,” and other idiosyncrasies of the Boston accent made their way on shows like SNL, where it was parodied.
Others highlighted the ridiculousness of a situation where Affleck appeared to have his girlfriend ask employees at a tourist-friendly store about the phrase “wicked smart.”
“I think it was a ‘ask the workers they’ll tell you where it’s from’ thing and we didn’t prove his point lmao,” she wrote in response to someone asking why Cowan would be asking her about it in the first place.
In a follow-up video in reply to a comment, she noted that Google searches for Affleck’s name appeared to go up after posting her first video.
@jillybees Replying to @serenity___22 that… could have been anyones fault…. #sorrycasey ♬ Elevator Music – Bohoman
We reached out to Affleck for comment and to @jillybees via TikTok comment.
