On March 23 1998, Matt Damon became, in no uncertain terms, an overnight sensation. Along with childhood friend Ben Affleck, he was awarded a screenwriting Oscar for the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. Serenaded by Billy Crystal and applauded by a grinning Jack Nicholson, the two had done the impossible. Like Sylvester Stallone before them, Damon and Affleck, two jobbing actors, had catapulted themselves from obscurity by writing their own movie, surprising everyone, including themselves.

“It was surreal,” says Damon of that initial rush, some ten years on. “People talk about ‘overnight success’, but I’d been working professionally for eleven years by the time Good Will Hunting hit. Still, the change is nearly indescribable - going from total obscurity to walking down a street in New York and having everybody turn and look; to feel the temperature of a room change when I walked in.”

Damon is now 36. He lives in Miami, and is married to former bartender Luciana Bozan. He is the stepfather of her daughter, Alexia, and the father of a one-year-old, Isabella. Wearing a black linen polo shirt and charcoal trousers, he’s in Los Angeles to promote the third film in the Robert Ludlum-inspired spy series, The Bourne Ultimatum. “A Guardian reporter - better watch your back,” he says, jokingly. He’s referring to the first act of the new film, in which an investigative reporter from this very newspaper brings Jason Bourne out of hiding and both become the target of a team of CIA assassins. “The Guardian was [director] Paul Greengrass’s idea,” says Damon.

But Damon is certainly not dismissive of the Bourne franchise, viewing it instead as the catalyst which launched the second act of his career. “After The Bourne Supremacy, I really had the freedom to make the films I wanted to make,” he says. “So I did Syriana, The Departed and The Good Shepherd, based on how good the scripts were and who was directing them. That’s pretty much all the control you can assert over your career - the choices you make and the jobs you take.”

Damon, whose parents divorced when he was two years old, was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a working actor by the age of 16. He attended Harvard, but dropped out just short of graduating to pursue his career, all the while writing Good Will Hunting with Affleck. He describes his early years as “fighting for table scraps”; his dining companions were Ed Norton, Brendan Fraser and Chris O’Donnell. He lost out to Norton for the 1996 drama, Primal Fear - “We all knew that was an instant career changer for whoever got it” - scoring a key role instead opposite Denzel Washington in Courage Under Fire. “You’d go in and fight each other,” he says, now. “And if you got hold of a role, you’d have to make enough of an impression to get another job.”

Things changed dramatically for Damon with the release of Good Will Hunting. He quickly solidified that position by heading for the big leagues: he worked for Coppola (The Rainmaker) and Spielberg (the title role in Saving Private Ryan). He kept a little indie cred with the pitch-black comedy Dogma for Kevin Smith. Meanwhile he launched Project Greenlight with Affleck, lending his Good Will kudos to other aspiring hopefuls. For director Anthony Minghella, he played against type and turned in one his strongest performances to date as a calculating killer in The Talented Mr Ripley. Indeed, it seemed as though nothing could go wrong for Damon. Until it did.
After releasing three consecutive films that failed to connect with audiences - The Legend of Bagger Vance, All the Pretty Horses and Finding Forrester - Damon saw the change, soon enough. "Having been on the sidelines out here in LA and watching the ebb and flow of other careers, I was not unaware of the implications of being in a few flops in a row. It was around that time that things really started drying up. Roles I thought I had in movies, suddenly disappeared ... For some reason, I was kind of detached about it and didn't take it personally. But it was, really, the end of the ascension of the Good Will Hunting period, if you will.

“It ended when The Bourne Identity opened,” he says. "I was doing a play over in London. On the Monday after the film's opening weekend, I had something like 20 film offers, having not had a single one in months. That’s when I got it. That’s the way this business works: if your movies do well at the box office, you will be offered more movies. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nice guy or you’re a prick. If your movies do well, there’s a job waiting for you in Hollywood. It's not any more complicated than that."

In 2002, however, the critical and commercial success of The Bourne Identity came as surprise to industry watchers. “The first Bourne was supposed to be a disaster,” says Damon, flatly. “We were a year delayed in coming out. We did four full rounds of re-shoots. The writer, Tony Gilroy, was the first writer in the history of Hollywood to arbitrate against himself so that he didn't have sole credit. These are strong signals to everybody in the industry that a turkey was coming."

Everyone but Damon. “The ‘disaster people’ look at the situation, panic and jump ship,” he says. “Sure, you see the countdown. But you’re the guy trying to defuse the bomb before you blow up. You’re in the middle of the shit, trying to solve it. And we fixed it. By the time the movie came out, I knew it had been fixed, because I’d been in the room solving the problems for a year ... Everything in my career changed.”

Damon now reportedly commands fees as high as $20m per film. Loosely based on the Ludlum novels - “We retain the titles,” he says - the Bourne franchise has been credited with breathing new life into the genre itself, with some going as far as to attribute the hardened retooling of Daniel Craig’s Bond to Bourne’s inescapable influence. Damon, whether on camera or off, remains a presence and focal point in every scene across all three films, saying more with a look than a line, as riveting in the movies’ string of impossibly frenetic action sequences as he is in each build-up and denouement which bracket them.

Damon’s next move remains uncertain. His name is already tied to two films awaiting release and another two in development. Of his most recent work, he seems to hold a special fondness for director Robert De Niro and The Good Shepherd (despite joining the film as a last-minute replacement for Leonardo DiCaprio) and has discussed starring in two additional films to make a proposed triptych chronicling the history of the CIA.

More immediate is an anticipated third collaboration with Greengrass, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, based on the Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s take on the Iraqi green zone.

Damon and Greengrass are currently working through scheduling conflicts to meet a proposed production start later this year. However, he remains on the fence about a possible fourth Bourne film, however, and, with it, the future of the franchise. He knows what he wants: working at the level he's at today. “It wouldn't be the worst thing,” he says, “but it’s tough to sustain.” He also knows what he doesn’t want: “You identify your beachhead and then vow to protect it. In doing so, you start making safe choices, and I don’t want to do that.”
The Guardian