“Just you wait”: the actor Matt Damon called “the best I’ve ever seen”
For the last 30 years, Matt Damon has been surrounding himself with some of the greatest actors and biggest stars in cinema history, so it takes a lot for him to single out one as the best he’s ever seen.
To illustrate that point, some of the names he’s shared the screen with include Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, Robin Williams, Robert Redford, Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Anthony Hopkins, Cher, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie, Jack Nicholson, Jeff Bridges, Jodie Foster, and Christian Bale.
That’s not even close to being all of them, and the one thing that unites all of the names mentioned above is that they’ve each won at least one Academy Award and have starred in at least one film that’s either an all-time classic or an ironclad candidate to be named one of the greatest movies ever made.
With that in mind, praise doesn’t come much higher than Damon, an Oscar-winner himself, naming one performer as the best he’d ever seen with his own eyes. Whether or not it counts as nepotism when he’s not technically part of the family, he once called Casey Affleck “one of the best actors that I’ve ever seen in my life,” but there was someone else who went a step beyond.
Strangely, they didn’t work together on a particularly good picture. Beset by studio interference and behind-the-scenes disagreements, Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm had the odd moment of splendour you’d expect from the idiosyncratic auteur, but Damon gained an eye-opening experience when he saw how the late Heath Ledger approached his craft.
“He was too bright for this world,” he reflected to GQ. “Coming off, I was telling everybody that I just worked with the best actor I’ve ever seen. And people were like, ‘What are you talking about? The guy from A Knight’s Tale?’ And I was like, ‘You just wait. And wait until you see what kind of a director he’s gonna be.'”
The Brothers Grimm was released in the United States on August 26th, 2005, to tepid reviews. However, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain premiered at the Venice Film Festival exactly two weeks later, which made everyone sit up and take notice that Ledger was a generational talent in the making, with his performance earning him his first Academy Award nomination.
He’d go one better when his incendiary turn as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight saw him claim a tragically bittersweet posthumous Oscar, and as far as Damon could see, he was levels ahead of everyone else. “There were things he did where I couldn’t have got there in three lifetimes,” he remarked. “And there were ways in which he was like a puppy dog. You wanted to protect him.”
Ledger’s tour-de-force as Batman’s arch-nemesis has evolved into one of the 21st century’s most influential performances, and as the best actor Damon has ever seen, he was barely scratching the surface of his potential before he passed away.
