The 1985 lie that almost cost Matt Damon his career: “I actually cost the production money”
While it’s not entirely true that reputation means everything in acting, since plenty of well-known arseholes have enjoyed long and successful careers, it’s vitally important for anyone at the very beginning of their career to prove themselves as trustworthy, something Matt Damon failed to do.
It’s hardly an unusual occurrence for young, unknown, or untested performers to tell some white lies to get themselves a job, but Damon’s smudging of the truth backfired spectacularly when his first paid acting gig went disastrously wrong, so much so that his contributions were a net negative.
The Academy Award-winning screenwriter’s first big-screen gig came when he delivered a single line of dialogue in Mystic Pizza, and his first stint on television saw him playing Brian Dennehy’s son in the made-for-television feature Rising Son two years later, but that wasn’t his first professional paycheque.
Combining his studies at Harvard with a burgeoning acting career, Damon would eventually drop out of the prestigious university to focus on his dream after becoming convinced that Geronimo: An American Legend would open all of the necessary doors. It didn’t, and for a while, he was absolutely shit out of luck.
Before he’d even enrolled at Harvard, though, he took a job that didn’t go as planned, which is an understatement. “My first professional acting job was for WVCB-TV,” Damon explained. “Dick Albert had a show called Use Your Smarts, and I did a vignette where I played a young Michael J Fox.”
So far, so inoffensive, with Use Your Smarts a staple of the local Boston channel for years, with weatherman Albert’s show running from 1982 to 1988. In 1985, an overzealous Damon was so desperate to be involved that he falsely claimed he could do something that he couldn’t, and the results were dire.
“I had to ice skate,” the star elaborated, which shouldn’t have been too taxing, if it wasn’t for one notable obstacle, and he learned the hard way about what can happen if you tell fibs. “I fell and knocked myself out. So my first job ever, I actually cost the production money, because I lied in my audition and couldn’t skate.”
Instead of being paid to impersonate Michael J Fox in an ice-skating segment, Damon was paid for knocking himself out cold trying to impersonate Michael J Fox in an ice-skating segment, forcing Use Your Smarts to pay double for a young actor to impersonate the Back to the Future favourite after it became pretty self-evident that the person they’d picked for the role was ill-equipped for the task.
The first time Damon had ever been financially compensated for performing in a film or television production couldn’t have gone much worse, and if he tried to wiggle his way into another Boston-area TV series, his reputation would precede him as the fella who lied about knowing how to ice-skate and took the money with nothing to show for it.
