JOIN USIn his recent film The Martian, Matt Damon played an astronaut stranded alone on Mars. As it happens, he had no difficulty conjuring up the feelings of loneliness and isolation he needed for the movie. All he had to do was think back to his early days as a struggling actor in Hollywood when he was broke and jobless.
“Los Angeles’s an easy place to feel alone in, particularly when you are unemployed,” he says. “So I had to think back to those days to remember what it felt like.”
The underrated star
It’s been a long time — 28 years to be exact — since Matt was involuntarily unemployed. In 2007 Forbes magazine named him Hollywood’s most bankable actor, but after a run of under-performing films — We Bought A Zoo, Monuments Men, Elysium — he claims his salary isn’t quite what it was. “Payments are changing a lot and the business has been carved up pretty good so all the salaries have taken a whack recently,” he says without rancour. “Careers are constantly changing, so you get paid based on how well you are perceived to be doing.”
Matt is clearly perceived to be doing well right now because he reportedly earned some £15 million for his role in director Ridley Scott’s The Martian. It was 44-year-old Matt’s first movie in 18 months, after Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic Interstellar. He used the time off to move his family, wife Luciana Barroso and children from their longtime home in New York to Los Angeles. He intentionally took a six month break from work, he says, because he wanted to be with the children during the move and transition to a new home and schools.
“And then I couldn’t find anything that I wanted to do. It’s tough — the movies that really have been my bread and butter for 20 years, they don’t make them anymore. It’s hard to get the money together and a lot of that stuff is migrating to television. “So they’re more apt to take a huge risk on a high-concept idea than on a kitchen-sink drama. And how many of those movies will I be able to do that I really like? You know what I mean? Ones that are original and that aren’t just a knock-off.”
Matt’s big break came 18 years ago, when he won an Oscar with his friend Ben Affleck for writing Good Will Hunting. Several high-profile romances followed: with actresses Minnie Driver, Claire Danes and Winona Ryder, to name but three. But since meeting waitress Lucy Barroso in 2002 while filming the comedy Stuck on You, he has been a settled family man.
Mr Dependable
Despite his fame says he finds it easy to avoid the paparazzi cameras and the hordes of star-seeking fans. “I’m a married man with kids and there’s no scandal about me,” he says with a laugh. “So long as the photographers get an updated picture every six months, they’re OK. A picture of us isn’t as valuable as a picture of somebody who may cause some scandal and I don’t think I’ve done anything to create any mystique around myself.”
Matt has begun filming the next Jason Bourne adventure, known simply as Bourne 5. It will be his third collaboration with British director Paul Greengrass and the fifth film in the series. Of the nearly 60 movies, he has made Matt is probably best known for his portrayal of the street-fighting, steely-eyed spy Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum.
He has a particular affection for Jason Bourne because his career was on the downward slide when he made the first Bourne film. After the successes of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ocean’s Eleven, he had appeared in the flops Gerry, The Majestic and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and his phone had stopped ringing. Then The Bourne Identity, based on the books by thriller writer Robert Ludlum, was released and suddenly he was once again one of the hottest young actors in Hollywood, commanding a salary of $10 million per film.
Although older, Matt promises the new Jason Bourne will be as tough and action-oriented as ever.
“I trained a lot more than I ever had done before because Paul Greengrass said that when we see Bourne in the first frame of the movie and it looks like he hasn’t been living well, then we don’t have a movie,” the actor says. “So he really wanted me to be physically fit and lean so it was a lot of work for me to get there. But it’s been great to just slip into that old skin and be on a set with Paul again. Doing another Bourne movie is exciting. Hopefully it will be as good as the others and it stands out mostly because it’s been so long since the last one, which came out in 2007. The third act of that one dovetails with the one that came out in 2004 and it’s all supposed to take place on the same day.”
For Matt, the Bourne movies are much more than just another job; he credits the character with essentially saving his life. “It’s incalculable how much these movies have helped my career,” he says. “Suddenly it put me on a short list of people who could get movies made and so directors called me and that’s the best part of it.”
“But another benefit has been that I have been able to do films that had wonderful scripts but on the face of it were not going to be box office successes like Syriana, The Departed and The Good Shepherd. I had the luxury of jumping on all three of them because I knew I was going to have another chance to do the Bourne character.”
He has two more films looming: the big-budget The Great Wall, a science-fiction take on the construction of The Great Wall of China, and Downsizing, a low-key satire from writer-director Alexander Payne (Sideways). But Matt doesn’t take the success of either for granted. “I’ve been around long enough to fall in and out of favour,” he says with a smile. “It’s been instructional.”