The audition that turned Matt Damon into a honeytrap: “They just wanted him for a price”
Ask any actor about auditioning, and they’ll probably come out in a cold sweat. However, even the most celebrated stars in Hollywood started as unknowns trying desperately to land any audition they could. Then, they submitted themselves to the stress and potential rejection of competing with hundreds of other actors for one role, often worrying that the casting director already knew exactly who they wanted, and the entire audition process was merely a formality.
Interestingly, this very scenario played out for Matt Damon in the mid-1990s, but he chose to play along with the charade.
Damon secured his first movie role when he was only 18 years old: a one-line part in 1988’s Mystic Pizza, which starred Julia Roberts. Before this single line of dialogue gave him hope that an acting career was viable, though, he had auditioned unsuccessfully for several bigger roles as a young teen. Amazingly, when he was 16 or 17, Damon somehow wrangled an audition for Tim Burton’s Batman at a time when the Dark Knight’s trusty sidekick Robin was still a part of the script.
“There’s the Robin role,” Damon told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “We went down to New York. 1987 maybe — ’87, 88’…I remember that we didn’t have sides — it wasn’t like you’re reading a scene with Batman. It was so secretive that you’re reading this other scene from some other movie.”
Ultimately, nobody landed this role because Burton admitted he wasn’t a massive fan of Robin and demanded the character be written out of the script. The same thing occurred on the sequel Batman Returns, only this time, Marlon Wayans was cast as the Boy Wonder before the character was excised from the screenplay. By the time it came to 1995’s Batman Forever, though, Burton was no longer directing the franchise, and Warner Bros was determined to finally bring the Dynamic Duo to the big screen.
When putting together the third instalment of the series in 1993, director Joel Schumacher’s vision of Robin wasn’t that of a child or young teenager in green underwear and pixie boots. Instead, he pictured a young man in his early 20s who was more of an equal to Batman, instead of the traditional mentor/father-figure dynamic that played out in the comics.
To his surprise, this meant Damon was once again in the right age range to play the most famous sidekick in comic book history, so he auditioned a second time for the role. By this point, he had already starred in School Ties and Geronimo: An American Legend, so he figured he stood a better chance of landing the part. He was invited back for a screen test, but then disaster struck: he discovered that his School Ties co-star Chris O’Donnell was Schumacher’s number one pick for the role, and this screen test was organised with an ulterior motive.
“Chris O’Donnell already had the part, but they were haggling over money,” Damon claimed with a wry grin. “The studio was flexing, basically, by flying in two other people to screen test. They wanted Chris, but they just wanted him for a price.”
Realising he was only there to help the studio establish leverage in negotiations with the actor, it truly envisioned playing Robin, was gutting for Damon. He had been used, and he knew it. Still, he decided not to let it affect him too deeply, as he was getting the experience of reading for a huge role in a blockbuster and making connections that may aid him later. In essence, he wasn’t about to throw his toys out of the pram.
“I remember at that stage in my career,” Damon explained, “You would go in and read, even if you knew you weren’t going to get the part.”
Ultimately, Damon had the last laugh. He became an A-list leading man who is still one of the biggest stars in the business today, while O’Donnell’s career faltered until he reinvented himself as a network TV star with NCIS: Los Angeles in the 2010s. There’s also the fact that, even though Damon never got to play Robin, his best pal Ben Affleck did wind up playing Batman – although perhaps the less said about that, the better.
