How Matt Damon became Hollywood’s king of cameos: “The world is in equilibrium”
It goes without saying that Matt Damon is one of the world’s biggest movie stars. In a three-decade career, he has given countless amazing performances in box office hits and smaller-scale passion projects alike.
He became an action star as the amnesiac superspy Jason Bourne and has made movies with auteurs like the Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh, and Christopher Nolan. All in all, Damon has done it all, and it’s given him one of the most recognisable faces in Hollywood. This is why it’s always so weird and exciting when he pops up unexpectedly in a cameo – something he has done way, way more than you think.
A quick glance at Damon’s career reveals he has made a mind-boggling 13 cameos over the years – a truly enormous number for one of the most famous actors in the world. Yet, despite the fact he has fairly regularly turned up out of the blue for a couple of minutes of screen time, it’s still shocking every time he does it.
It’s rare for a genuine A-list star to step outside the boundaries of lead roles because their advisors would tell them it’s a risky move for their brand. Think about it: can you imagine Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, or Meryl Streep appearing for shits and giggles in Thor: Ragnarok?
Damon mustn’t have received that particular memo, though, because he never met a two-minute performance that didn’t make him think, “I could play that.” His first cameo came in Finding Forrester, a 2000 Gus Van Sant drama that saw him appear as a lawyer talking to the main character at the movie’s end. This was only three years after he’d broken through with Good Will Hunting, but already, he clearly saw no harm in doing a buddy a favour. After all, Van Sant helmed both.
Next, Damon cameoed as a silly version of himself alongside best pal Ben Affleck as they shot a fictional sequel to Good Will Hunting in Kevin Smith’s Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. The best part of the gag is that the sequel is titled Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season, and it ends with Damon shooting that snooty blonde guy from the bar before Affleck says, “Apple sauce, bitch.”
Damon made two cameos in 2004, with one of them being arguably his most famous. After all, say “Scotty doesn’t know” to a cinephile who was a teenager in the 2000s, and they’ll involuntarily burst into song. As the bald-headed punk rock singer in teen comedy EuroTrip, Damon walks away with the entire movie, which is especially funny when you consider he wasn’t supposed to be in it at all. He simply happened to be in Prague shooting a film at the time and knew the writers of EuroTrip from college.
“They said, ‘Will you come play this, you know, Henry Rollins kind of insane, bad version of a suburban, you know, punk band guy?” Damon told a Reddit AMA. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m in Prague.’ So, I showed up, and I’m sitting there, and I’m like, ‘I’m wearing a wig [in The Brothers Grimm], just shave my head, let’s just go for it.’ And we did it and put a bunch of piercings all over. So, it was kind of a family affair.”
Damon’s cameos subsequently dried up for more than a decade unless you count his parts in movies like Youth Without Youth or Che: Part Two, which are arguably more like uncredited minor roles than true cameos. Fans rejoiced in 2017, though, when he donned a long black wig to play a preposterous Asgardian theatre actor version of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki in Thor: Ragnarok. That came about because Damon had become close friends with star Chris Hemsworth, and he reprised the cameo – an unusual feat – in the sequel, Love and Thunder.
In more recent years, Damon’s cameos have continued in the vein of helping his pals out. He popped up in two Soderbergh movies – Unsane and No Sudden Move – and disguised himself to play a hillbilly in Deadpool 2. That movie was directed by his old stunt double David Leitch, and he was amusingly credited as Dickie Greenleaf, the name of Jude Law’s character who was the object of Damon’s murderous affections in The Talented Mr Ripley.
As for Damon’s future cameos, James Cameron has let it be known that he wants Damon to pop up in one of the Avatar sequels. Damon famously turned Avatar down and lost out on 10% of the $2 billion gross in the process, and Cameron joked, “We have to do it so that the world is in equilibrium again. But he doesn’t get 10%. Fuck that!”
To close out this deep dive into Damon’s cameo fetish, here’s a fun factoid: when he briefly reprised his Dogma role of Loki in 2019’s Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, it meant he had now played a version of the mischievous Norse God four times in two distinct fictional universes: the View Askewniverse and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
