Matt Damon, the 1996 role that got away, and the “epiphany” it gave him that changed everything
If making it in Hollywood was as easy as writing your own screenplay and starring in it, then everyone would be doing it. It doesn’t always work like that, though, even if it did for Matt Damon.
Still, he and his cast-iron BFF, Ben Affleck, had to jump through plenty of hoops over a number of years before they could finally breathe easy, standing on the set of Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting for the first time and breathing a little easier about their dreams finally becoming a reality.
Even at that, the pair couldn’t have predicted an Academy Award win for ‘Best Original Screenplay’, a ‘Best Actor’ nomination for Damon, and a $225 million haul at the box office. And to think, less than two years before Van Sant called action on day one of production, he’d been staring defeat straight in the face.
Having become accustomed to seeing so many of the same faces at auditions around town, with Chris O’Donnell emerging as his arch-nemesis, Damon was savvy enough to know that all it could take was one script to change everything. He found one, and he was aware that it was a game-changer for whoever played it, but it wasn’t him.
“It was actually the movie Primal Fear that was kind of our epiphany,” he explained. “Because that part, for some reason, became available. I don’t know how it got kicked down through all the ‘name’ young actors, but it did. And it was a great role. And it just got kicked down to the jackals, right?”
By “name young actors,” he mostly meant Leonardo DiCaprio, who passed on the part of Aaron Stampler, creating a feeding frenzy that saw Damon throw his hat into the ring alongside the likes of James Van Der Beek, Pedro Pascal, and James Marsden, who were among thousands of hopefuls vying for the opportunity.
“And so, now all of us had a chance,” he reflected on the moment when the floor opened up. “I mean, I got a dialect coach with money I barely had. I really worked hard on this audition. And Edward Norton got it.” He wasn’t even a no-name actor: Norton had never appeared onscreen in a movie or TV show, but you can’t say he wasn’t the right man for the job.
In his screen debut, he secured a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nomination at the Oscars for a remarkable performance, and as devastated as Damon was to lose out on what he accurately predicted would be an overnight star-maker, it emboldened him to take charge of his own destiny, which worked out alright for him in the long run.
“That was when Ben and I went, ‘Well, we’ve got to just write this thing,'” he conceded. “Like, that’s the only way we’re going to get good roles.” With Primal Fear out of the window, he refocused all of his energy on the Good Will Hunting script, and you can’t say it didn’t pay off.
