“That would be great”: the iconic British institution Matt Damon would love to play
One of the biggest potential hurdles that faced Christopher Nolan when he cast Matt Damon as the title character in The Odyssey is that he can’t do a British accent for shit.
Fortunately, the director negated that obstacle by opting to have the cast use American accents instead, including London-born Tom Holland. While it’s annoyed some of the historical purists, it’s a damn sight better than having one of Boston’s favourite sons try and pull off a brogue he can’t master for three hours straight.
Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel was about as solid a historical epic as you’d expect from the filmmaker who repopularised the genre with Gladiator at the turn of the millennium, but it never got any less jarring hearing Damon and Ben Affleck trying and failing to sound convincing as 14th century French aristocrats in a film that did what every other big-budget period piece does and presents the characters as English.
Some actors simply aren’t cut out to alter their voices for roles, and while Damon did an admirable enough job playing a South African in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, the United Kingdom isn’t in his wheelhouse, not that it prevented him from declaring that he’d embrace the challenge of playing one of the nation’s most iconic fictional characters on the big screen.
It was a non-starter, though, and for several reasons. For one, Damon is American, and no American actor has ever been cast as James Bond. Secondly, he was already Jason Bourne at the time, so he’d inadvertently made a huge impact on the franchise by ensuring that Casino Royale looked at his homework to avoid going down the Austin Powers route.
Thirdly, the star eventually turned against 007 and bemoaned his very existence, so it was equally clear that even spit-balling a suggestion that the Academy Award-winning screenwriter suit up in a pristine tuxedo, start necking shaken-not-stirred martinis, and save the world became an increasingly ludicrous suggestion, even if he was the one who said it in the first place.
“I’ve never really thought of it, but that would be great,” he revealed in 2004, in between the release of The Bourne Supremacy and Casino Royale, before Daniel Craig had been announced as Pierce Brosnan’s replacement. “The only thing is, James Bond is such a British institution.”
That’s true, and while the door has remained open for Irish and Antipodean actors to inherit the role, James Brolin remains the one and only American to have been officially promised the role of Bond, until it was snatched out of his hands when Roger Moore agreed to dust himself off for another go-round as MI6’s finest.
“I’d love the challenge of playing him,” Damon acknowledged. “But there are so many great British actors who I think should be on the list before me.” His preferred candidate was Ewan McGregor, who, to be quite frank, would be a crap James Bond. It could be worse; it could have been him, which would have caused many 007 aficionados to spontaneously combust in anger.
