How Matt Damon really feels about the $900 billion cost of being rescued onscreen: “That’s a bargain”
Whether it’s by accident or design, certain patterns can emerge during an actor’s career that accidentally make them the face of a highly specific subgenre. For Matt Damon, it’s being rescued onscreen.
It’s become a running gag that the Academy Award-winning screenwriter, cameo king, character actor, and leading man frequently finds himself in danger that necessitates an assist. It’s happened so often that somebody even tallied up the total cost, and it’s a whisker away from reaching a trillion dollars.
Is he worth it? Damon would say so, and he was even confronted with the numbers. It’s become woven into his celluloid folklore that he might genuinely be reluctant to take on another film that requires him to be rescued from peril, although Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey may disagree, seeing as it looks like it’s about to happen all over again.
He was retrieved from behind enemy lines in Saving Private Ryan and Courage Under Fire, evacuated from a doomed planet in the animated Titan AE, escorted off-world in Elysium, held captive by local forces in Green Zone, saved from being stranded on a time-bending planet in Interstellar, and safely brought home from Mars in The Martian, none of which comes cheap.
The estimated cost of rescuing Matt Damon from his various mishaps on this planet or another one across both live-action and animation was totalled at around $900 billion, over half of which came from Interstellar alone. When shown the facts, the actor tried to offer a meagre defence of his recurring habit.
Once Access Hollywood told him it was only $300,000 to be whisked away from danger via helicopter in Courage Under Fire, Damon seemed pleased: “That’s a bargain!” When Titan AE‘s $200 billion rescue attempt was mentioned, though, he had a different take: “That’s kind of not fair, that’s an animated movie,” he pleaded. “So I just did a voice for that movie, like 20 years ago.”
Damon suggested that “to give up $200 billion for that one was a little tough” because he was only standing in a recording booth, but he still tried to wrangle his way out of being rescued in Nolan’s sci-fi epic. “Again, that was a cameo!” he countered. “That was less than a week of work.”
As for his most expensive rescue in Ridley Scott’s Oscar-nominated drama that definitely wasn’t a musical or comedy, Damon’s defence was a little more meek. “Come on, I’m a good guy!” It doesn’t matter if he’s a good guy, a bald convict, a fresh-faced soldier, or a voiceover artist; he doesn’t make a very strong case for hundreds of billions of dollars being funnelled towards his constant exfiltrations.
To be fair, he’s in the midst of a decent run. It’s been years since a movie cast Damon as a character in need of rescue, and it might have something to do with his awareness of the meme. He’s always been smart enough to play the Hollywood game at the top level, and if too many people think he’s being saved too often, then there’s a high chance he’s actively avoiding any scripts that place him in such peril.
