The iconic movie character Matt Damon can’t stand: “He’s repulsive”
Cinema’s most famous, legendary, and indelible characters aren’t necessarily universally beloved, and Matt Damon has some serious issues with one of the most iconic of them all.
He has his reasons, as you’d expect, but they do come served with two notable side dishes: irony and hypocrisy. It’s perfectly fine for anyone to despise a fictional figure who also happens to be one of the most instantly recognisable on the planet, but neither are his points entirely invalid.
Every character who gets rebooted, remade, or reinvented for multiple different generations has to evolve, because you can’t always drop someone who thrived in the 1960s into the modern era without changing a thing and expect them to have the same effect, apart from maybe Austin Powers.
Speaking of secret agents, the most obvious example is James Bond. 007 has remained at the forefront of pop culture since Dr No debuted in 1962, but if Daniel Craig was still slapping his female co-stars on the arse and telling them to fuck off so the men could talk, the franchise would be dead in the water.
Roger Moore’s raised eyebrow wouldn’t work in the modern era, either, although you could state a decent case for Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan being more timeless than their predecessors, even if they weren’t immune to the Bond-isms that may or may not fly with 21st-century audiences.
In his own way, Damon is partly responsible for the Craig era, as is Mike Myers’ shagadelic spy, since in an effort to distance itself from light-hearted parody as possible in a post-Powers world where Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer had become the industry’s marquee ass-kickers with a badge and a gun, Casino Royale took a more rough, ready, and realistic approach to 007.
Naturally, that didn’t sit too well with the Academy Award-winning screenwriter. “They could never make a James Bond movie like any of the Bourne films,” he raged in 2009, when Craig was already two films deep. “Because Bond is an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people. He’s repulsive.”
Would this be the same Matt Damon who said five years previously, before Craig was announced as the new 007 and in between his first two outings as Bourne, that he’d “love the challenge” of playing James Bond? Yes, it would, making it slightly odd that he’d voice his enthusiasm to inherit the mantle before subsequently writing them off as a “repulsive” human being.
Everyone talks out of the side of their mouth in Hollywood, but whether he can’t stand the character or not, and it sounds like he can’t stand him, Damon and Bond will be forever connected because Martin Campbell couldn’t have made Casino Royale the way that he did if it wasn’t for The Bourne Identity.
