Matt Damon names “the hardest thing to do” as an actor, and the one person who did it best
Directing is the only white whale that Matt Damon hasn’t yet gotten around to capturing, but during a career that spans almost 40 years, he’d done pretty much everything else, and he’s done it very well.
He’s an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, a three-time Oscar-nominated actor, an Oscar-nominated producer, a three-time Primetime Emmy-nominated television producer, and the co-founder of a production company, so he’s spent a lot of time plunging his fingers into a wide variety of pies.
That’s without mentioning that he’s played almost every kind of role an actor can play, whether it’s as an uncredited extra in Field of Dreams, his one-line debut in Mystic Pizza, the leading man of multiple big-budget blockbusters, or those uncredited cameos in productions running every stage of the budgetary gamut that he’s so fond of making.
He’s worked with some of the all-time greats on both sides of the camera, but for Damon’s money, there’s one aspect of thespianism that’s hardest of all. It isn’t something that applies to him anymore, seeing as he’s been a household name for the last three decades, yet he remains adamant that being employed as a working actor for one day’s work on a movie is “the hardest thing to do”.
Ben Affleck’s soulmate has turned that notion into a side hustle as the industry’s resident king of cameos, but that’s not what he meant. He was talking about being an up-and-coming, unknown, and jobbing performer who only has minimal time on set and onscreen to make an impression, and he still vividly remembers the best he ever saw.
“We were shooting a scene in New York, and we came in, and there was this throwaway part of a maître d’ who sat us, and it got cut out of the movie,” he recalled of his time filming 2011’s The Adjustment Bureau with Emily Blunt. “But I remember Emily and I went and sat down, and this maître d’ walked away, and they cut, and we both looked at each other, and Em goes, ‘That guy’s really fucking good.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, what the fuck?’ That guy was really good.”
The full version of the scene didn’t make it into the movie, but Damon was nonetheless impressed, adding that “there was something just incredibly interesting, but real and natural” about what they’d brought to an insignificant day job that never made it much further than the editing room. Did he remember their name? At the time, he didn’t, but years later, he found out their identity, and it was Pedro Pascal.
“Just his presence, we both recognised it immediately,” he added, even if it took Hollywood a few more years to catch on. These days, Pascal has become one of cinema’s most ubiquitous figures, and you can barely turn around without bumping into his latest movie or TV show. Back then, though, he was taking bit parts in anything he could lay his hands on.
His recollection of the scene being excised completely wasn’t correct, with Pascal glimpsed for a second or two as he sits Damon and Blunt’s characters at their table, but he still made a mark, and these days, he’s one of the most in-demand actors in the business.
