The 1995 cult classic movie Matt Damon refused to star in: “I’d rather be broke”
In theory, a young and hungry actor desperate to get their foot in the door wouldn’t think twice about accepting a key supporting role in a movie that was jam-packed with big names, but Matt Damon felt so strongly that he said he’d rather stay on the breadline than get involved.
As hubristic as that sounds, it’s not as if he didn’t become a household name for digging his heels in. After all, it would have been easy for Damon and Ben Affleck to take the money being offered for their Good Will Hunting script and hand it over to a studio, on the condition they didn’t star in the movie.
That was completely unfathomable, and they were right to bet on themselves, with their Academy Award win for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ propelling them to overnight stardom, and it set the template for the three decades of success that followed, even if, unlike his best friend, Affleck has had a few rocky moments.
Even before Gus Van Sant’s drama had been released, Damon was in an interesting position. He’d abandoned his studies at Harvard to focus on acting full-time because he was convinced that 1993’s Geronimo: An American Legend would be a career-maker, only for the film to flop at the box office.
He also almost killed himself to drop a dangerous amount of weight for 1996’s Courage Under Fire, a role that took him years to recover from, with one notable benefit being that his performance convinced Steven Spielberg he’d found the perfect candidate to play the title role in Saving Private Ryan.
Between those two points, though, Damon turned down another major gig. The highest-paid gig of his fledgling career, no less, with TriStar Pictures offering him $250,000 to play ‘The Kid’ in The Quick and the Dead. It was life-altering money, especially for someone who only had a handful of big-screen credits to their name at the time, but he wasn’t interested.
“I want the kind of career Robert Duvall has,” he explained, justifying his decision to turn down an action-packed western directed by Sam Raimi that boasted Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Keith David, Gary Sinise, and Lance Henriksen among its ensemble cast, and a glorified, tongue-in-cheek B-western wasn’t going to give him that opportunity.
“I don’t feel like chasing movies like that is going to lead to a 40-year career,” he reasoned. “I’d rather be broke.” You can see the irony, considering ‘The Kid’ was eventually played by Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the biggest and most bankable stars of Damon’s generation, who’s not too far away from celebrating the 40th anniversary of his career, and he’s been a very big deal for most of it.
The Quick and the Dead might have had to wait a while to be reappraised as a cult classic, but it still fared better than Damon’s only contributions to cinema in 1995, with the actor making a non-speaking cameo appearance in the forgotten independent comedy, Glory Daze.
