“They finally gave him some money”: the one director Matt Damon would “do anything” for
Any filmmaker or actor lucky enough to count Matt Damon as a friend can call him up at short notice to ask for a favour, and history has shown that he’ll almost certainly be willing to oblige.
His college buddies have written their first screenplay, and they need somebody at short notice to swing by the set and shoot a quick scene as a shaven-headed musician called Donny? Sure, no problem, he dropped everything and lent himself to EuroTrip, gifting the world ‘Scotty Doesn’t Know’ in the process.
Why was he buried under prosthetics and kept unrecognisable in Deadpool 2, going so far as to be listed in the credits under one of his character’s aliases from The Talented Mr Ripley, Dickie Greenleaf? Because Ryan Reynolds asked him to. Why has he made so many cameo appearances in Steven Soderbergh films? Because the director asked him to, and he was happy to do it.
The ‘uncredited Matt Damon cameo’ has become a subgenre unto itself, with the Academy Award winner popping up in everything from Gus Van Sant’s Finding Forrester and Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls to George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and three Kevin Smith flicks, so he was never going to turn down a bit part in Terry Gilliam’s mindfuck, The Zero Theorem.
Even though their first collaboration on The Brothers Grimm hadn’t turned out the way anyone hoped, the duo struck up a bond during production. When the sci-fi story first revealed its cast in August 2013, Al Pacino was announced to be playing the shadowy figure known only as ‘Management’. By the time the cameras started rolling in October, he’d dropped out, and Gilliam needed a replacement.
“I’m just doing a very small part in it,” Damon told Vulture. “Someone finally gave him money to do this one, thank God. I’d do anything for Terry. It’s been ten years since I last worked with him. I wrote Terry this whole email, because we had this whole conversation about what the character would look like, because the story takes place in the future, but he had a specific look that he wanted.”
The actor was basically bald after wrapping Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, so Gilliam decided to give his character a receding hairline and a shock of white hair. It’s not the weirdest look he’s ever sported onscreen, and it wouldn’t have even been the weirdest look he’d sported in a Gilliam movie if there hadn’t been those battles over his fake nose in The Brothers Grimm, but Damon is usually game for anything.
Like many of the Monty Python legend’s previous features, The Zero Theorem was stuck in development hell for years and endured several false starts, recastings, and funding issues before it started shooting, only to tank at the box office when it was finally released.
Still, Damon said he’d “do anything” for Gilliam, so when he got that call, he was in, no questions asked. If the latter ever gets around to helming another film, then there’s at least one name he can rely on to show up if they’re needed.
