The 1996 movie that landed Matt Damon perhaps his most important role
One of the greatest strengths of being an actor is one’s ability to say yes to anything. Although it can often lead to some funky projects that are a lot more questionable than others, it only takes that one special film for someone to see the spark that you’ve been waiting for years for someone to see.
While Matt Damon created his own luck when making Good Will Hunting, he had to thank the film Courage Under Fire for getting him in front of Steven Spielberg for the first time.
Looking back on his career, Damon was always one to create his own luck. Instead of waiting for the right script, Damon had workshopped the first draft of Good Will Hunting while in a writing class in college, eventually finessing it with Ben Affleck before bringing it to the big screen.
Both of them had had bit roles in the industry in movies like School Ties and even snuck their way into being an extra in Field of Dreams, but they needed that one extra ingredient when Robin Williams signed on to make the film. It’s already hard not to enjoy every minute of Williams, even on a bad day, but the creative dynamo had something in mind for Damon when he introduced him to Spielberg for the first time.
As Damon remembered, he was given the role in Saving Private Ryan because Spielberg recognised him from another movie, telling GQ, “I had read for Private Ryan, but I hadn’t been cast. He said, ‘I think I know you from somewhere’. I said, ‘Well, I was in this movie called Courage Under Fire,’ and he goes, ‘That’s the one, I actually told me that that guy was the exact type of guy that I wanted playing Private Ryan, but he was too skinny.”
It’s a reminder that Hollywood careers are often built on moments most audiences barely notice. Courage Under Fire wasn’t Damon’s film by any stretch, but the commitment he brought to a relatively small role was enough to stay in Spielberg’s mind long after the credits had rolled. Sometimes a performance only needs to impress one person, provided that person happens to be one of the biggest directors in the world.
Ironically, the very transformation that made Damon so convincing also cost him the part, at least initially. His dramatic weight loss suited the haunted soldier he was portraying, but it left him looking nothing like the healthy young serviceman Spielberg had imagined for Private Ryan. By the time the project finally came together, though, Damon had regained the physicality the role demanded without losing the emotional vulnerability that had first caught the director’s eye.
Then again, the soldier that Damon played in Courage Under Fire was a far cry from what he was in the Spielberg epic. Playing the role of medic Andrew Ilario, Damon looks like a shell of what he was in Good Will Hunting, painting the serviceman as a struggling heroin addict hiding a dark secret about what he saw happen on the other side of enemy lines in the Gulf War.
Definitely not Private Ryan material at the time, but when looking at Damon’s eyes in the film, it’s easy to see what Spielberg saw in him. The core presentation of Private Ryan is about depicting the internal conflict of someone being discharged from war, and even if Ilario had a far less glamorous way of being discharged, there’s still that feeling of resentment and anger knowing that he couldn’t do everything he could to help his country.
Even though Damon arguably has a bigger presence in Saving Private Ryan, he delivers one of the most gripping performances of the 1990s with only a few minutes of screen time. Since everything talks about the soldiers who went to find him and bring him back home, the audience almost grows to resent him the second he turns up onscreen before they see the real kid behind that camouflage suit.
Despite looking the part and working opposite powerhouses like Tom Hanks, Damon’s chance meeting with Spielberg is still a lesson to actors everywhere. The next chance can be around the corner, and if anyone wants to be halfway successful in the business, they owe it to themselves to at least take a chance on it.
