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Meeting Matt Damon for the first time in 1997, at a swanky 65th-floor restaurant in New York named Rainbow Room, the then-27-year-old unknown actor was like a puppy dog. He was eager and excited to hear about the great reaction to the first screening of Good Will Hunting, the drama he had written and starred in with childhood best friend Ben Affleck.
"I think that our version of the fairytale kind of ended with Good Will Hunting, when we won our [best screenplay] Oscar and we thought that was it, that's the end of act three, and we didn't even think beyond that," Damon recalls as he relaxes on a couch in a hotel in Cancun, Mexico, for a promotion of his new drama, Elysium.
The soft-spoken actor, wearing black accountant-style glasses and a crumpled grey shirt and jeans, proudly recounts how, after Affleck's 2013 Directors Guild award for his Oscar-winning drama Argo, ''he emailed me and said, 'We didn't even dream about this one!' So our lives have now officially surpassed anything we could've hoped for."
It's not hard to be won over by Damon, who deserves his reputation as one of the most down-to-earth actors in Hollywood. He's also a happily married husband who recently renewed his vows with former bartender Luciana Barroso (10 years to the day after they met) and a father of four: Alexia, 13 (Luciana's daughter from a previous marriage), Isabella, 7, Gia, 5, and Stella, 2. Damon admits to a hangover after last night's beach party, where he teamed up with fellow guests Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum to film a spoof music video to later air on Jimmy Kimmel's US talk show.
New Yorker
At last, a good big film. The legacy of the summer, thus far, has been jetsam: moribund movies that lie there, bloated and beached, gasping to break even. But here is something angry and alive: “Elysium,” written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, and set in the year 2154.
The casting is spot-on here, because something in Damon—in the unsoothable anxiety of his gaze, and in the squat, wrestler’s physique that seems less buffed than primed to explode—suggests an internal drive of high intensity. Projecting not the will to power but a tireless lust to live, he remains likable, and oddly bashful—a regular guy who happens to belong in extremis. Cagney would approve, I reckon, though he never forgot how comic such hardihood can be, and, watching “Elysium,” he would warn Damon not to lose the smile.
As he seeks refuge beneath a truckload of pigs, you realize what “Elysium” has that films like “Star Trek Into Darkness” and “Man of Steel” refuse to countenance. It doesn’t just look and sound right. It smells.
Jo Blo
Matt Damon, sporting a shaved head, plays the everyman hero. Max DeCosta is definitely no Jason Bourne, and like Wikus in DISTRICT 9, he’s initially selfish, with his only goal being to survive, and everything else being secondary. This makes Damon a believable, intense hero, with a total absence of action hero posturing, and his numerous exo-suited battles and gunfights having a desperate intensity. Damon makes for an ideal hero, with his physicality suiting the action scenes, but also bringing an emotional charge to the film that we might not have gotten otherwise. Action heroes these days tend to be stoic. Here, Damon’s Max is terrified of dying, and just wants to survive.
New York Daily News
If all goes according to plan, one day, he’ll find something to direct.
“(But) I’m going to miss everything about New York. There’s nothing I don’t love about this city — well, yeah, except the sports teams,” says the life-long Red Sox fan, unable to resist one last dig at the Yankees and Alex Rodriguez’s contract before he leaves the city.
“I don’t know how it’s going to go,” Damon adds, suddenly sounding very much like a 27-year-old. “We might turn around and come back.”
Boston Globe
For Damon, a film is a trust fall, leaning into the void in the hopes that a talented filmmaker will catch you. “Elysium”’s physically demanding role, with much battering and bruising and hobbling for its protagonist, and little dialogue, reminded Damon of his three films as Jason Bourne. “I remember Tony Gilroy saying, on the second one [2004’s ‘The Bourne Supremacy’], when he made the decision to kill Franka [Potente]’s character in the first act of the second movie, he called me up and said, ‘I just want to be clear. You don’t have anyone to talk to anymore!’ ” Damon remembers with a chuckle. “He called it the samurai version of the movie.”
Rather than adding to his list of famous directorial scalps, Damon would prefer to work again with some of the filmmakers who generously taught him when he was first starting out, like Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. “While he was shooting ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ he would stop and answer any question that I asked him, which was really nice of him,” Damon says about Spielberg. “I just remember thinking I don’t know enough to be here with him yet. I have to try to absorb all of this, because I’ll learn lessons later.”
Blomkamp’s desire to control his creative fate was challenged when one scene featuring Damon’s character played poorly with early audiences. Ultimately he took two days to reshoot the scene. “The film that happens in theaters — the right calls were made,” he said. “That’s the director’s cut.”
Re: The always good Collider interview
