Matt Damon would “rather be waterboarded” than reject George Clooney: “I had sworn up and down”
Few A-list actors do as many favours for their friends as Matt Damon, who seems to spend most of his free time, and great stretches of his career, lending a helping hand whenever someone asks.
If Steven Soderbergh needs someone to shoot a small supporting role or make an uncredited cameo on short notice, the evidence is there to suggest he’s got Damon on speed dial because he knows he’ll get him, while his ongoing status as Hollywood’s king of cameos only underlines his favour-lending credentials.
It’s even more impressive that the Academy Award winner continues to find the time to pop up anywhere and everywhere when he’s one of the industry’s most in-demand names, which almost came back to haunt him when a four-film stretch that saw Damon take barely any time off in years almost ruled him out of a picture its director was offering to him and nobody else.
Having worked together on the Ocean’s trilogy, the Good Will Hunting scribe struck up a close friendship with George Clooney, who then segued into filmmaking and subsequently cast Damon in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind in, of course, an uncredited cameo before reuniting on The Monuments Men.
Both had worked with the Coen brothers before, and when their unmade screenplay for Suburbicon was placed back into development and polished by Clooney and his writing partner, Grant Heslov, there was only one name at the top of the filmmaker’s casting wish list to embody Gardner Lodge.
“I had four movies lined up in a row, starting with The Martian,” Damon explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “I went from The Martian right into The Great Wall, which went right into Jason Bourne, which went right into Downsizing. It was two solid years of work. And I had sworn up and down to my family that I wouldn’t take anything else.”
Unfortunately, that was right around the time Clooney reached out. “When George called me, I was like, ‘I’d rather be waterboarded than turn you down, but I have to be with my family.'” After doing his best to resist the advances, his frequent collaborator dangled a carrot in front of Damon that he couldn’t resist: upending his original plans and moving the entire production closer to home.
“I was sitting at the dinner table with my wife when this text came in that said, ‘How about if I move it to LA?'” he recalled. “It was George who suggested it. I turned the phone to my wife and she goes, ‘OK, you’re doing it.'” If Suburbicon were shooting anywhere else, then it would have been a hard pass, but with Damon and his family residing in the city, he could sleep in his own bed every night after work.
Not many people in the business are powerful or influential enough to uproot a movie and shift it across the nation for the sake of one actor, but Clooney clearly was, even if it wasn’t worth it when Suburbicon was largely panned by critics and tanked at the box office after failing to recoup even half of its budget.
