Matt Damon on the biggest mistake of his career: “You will never meet an actor who turned down more money”
Dig beneath the surface, and you quickly learn that Hollywood is teeming with stories of failure and error. Here, we join celebrated actor Matt Damon as he discusses the biggest mistake of his entire career – one that quite literally lost him millions of dollars.
Matt Damon rose to fame in the late 1990s and remains one of the most recognisable actors in Hollywood. After securing a place at Harvard University, where he wrote on early draft of what would become Good Will Hunting for his English class, Damon dropped out to make his big screen debut in 1993’s Geronimo: An American Legend. It was an enormous risk, and sadly it didn’t pay off. The film was a critical and commercial failure. Still, Damon was smart enough to stick to his guns and eventually received his first taste of critical attention for Courage Under Fire in 1996. The following year saw the release of Good Will Hunting, and with that his career was in the bag.
With success came pressure to conform. However, Damon was always more interested in playing as many different roles as possible than he was in being a leading man. “I never wanted to do the same kind of movies over and over anyway,” he once said, “so my theory on it all is I’m just gonna try and dodge the label and keep doing what I am doing.”
There were times when Damon’s commitment to variety backfired. During his Cannes Film Festival masterclass in 2021, the actor recalled how he’d turned down a lead role in one of the biggest blockbusters in film history, despite the director offering him a sizeable chunk of its profits. The film went on to gross a whopping $2.8 billion worldwide. “I was offered a little movie called Avatar,” Damon confessed, through quotes published in Deadline. “James Cameron offered me 10% of it. I will go down in history… you will never meet an actor who turned down more money”. Released in 2009, Avatar famously went on to gross a whopping $2.8billion worldwide.
Apparently, Damon didn’t want to do the sci-fi movie because he was shooting the Jason Bourne trilogy at the time and took a “moral” decision not to break his contract and abandon the franchise. Cameron subsequently cast the then-relatively unknown actor Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, who wasn’t offered the 10% cut Damon let slip through his fingers. Worthington has, of course, gone on to appear in 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water and is expected to stay onboard for the string of Avatar sequels James Cameron has scheduled for the next decade.
During that same Cannes Masterclass, Damon told the audience that fellow actor John Krasinski was the first person he informed of his foolish decision. Apparently, Krasinski rose from the table in shock before announcing: “Nothing would be different in your life if you had done Avatar, except you and me would be having this conversation in space.”
