Matt Damon names the single greatest acting performance he’s ever seen: “It was awesome”
As an actor, Matt Damon has given several standout, award-nominated performances. As a cast member, he’s been in the room and watched many more standout, award-nominated, and award-winning performances unfold in front of his eyes, and one of them completely blew him away.
He made the Academy Awards shortlist for ‘Best Actor’ in Good Will Hunting, sharing several scenes with Robin Williams on electric form, with his co-star claiming the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ prize, and being in close proximity to Oscar-bothering turns has become something of a recurring theme during his career.
Damon was there alongside Jude Law in The Talented Mr Ripley, Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, Mark Wahlberg in The Departed, Morgan Freeman in Invictus, and Jeff Bridges in True Grit, all of whom were recognised by the Academy for giving one of the five best leading or supporting performances of the year.
However, just because he’s shared the screen with so many performers in either Oscar-winning or Oscar-nominated form, that doesn’t disqualify other names from being among the best he’s ever sparred with. The most obvious example is Heath Ledger in Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm, with Damon so entranced that he definitively called his onscreen sibling the greatest actor he’d ever seen in the flesh.
He also considers Casey Affleck to be in that bracket, but you can’t help but catch the scent of nepotism in the air, considering that he’s the younger brother of Damon’s platonic life partner, and when he won an Oscar for Manchester by the Sea, it was only because scheduling conflicts ruled him out of playing it himself.
One thing that unites all of the performances above, including the ones the erstwhile Jason Bourne delivered himself, is that he didn’t call any of them one of the finest performances in cinema history. That honour was reserved exclusively for one co-star, who inevitably won ‘Best Actor’: Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
“I think it’s one of the greatest screen performances of all time,” he told Virgin Radio. “It was awesome watching Chris and Cillian, and they really built it together, and were just in lockstep with one another. I think any time you see a performance that good, it’s because the director and actor are just completely in sync.”
Was he finished there with the superlatives to describe Murphy’s tour de force, which accomplished exactly what everyone thought it would, since he was the front-runner in the Oscars race from almost the second the biographical drama was first announced? Not quite. “It was just a masterpiece,” he added. “And a masterful performance.”
While you’re free to agree or disagree with Damon calling Oppenheimer‘s central showcase one of the best to ever grace the silver screen, he was there, and you weren’t, so he can say whatever the hell he wants.
