The 2004 Matt Damon scene that saved a car crash victim from a coma: “It’s one of those things”
It always sounds a bit wanky when you hear people saying that cinema has the power to change lives, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true, with Matt Damon inadvertently preventing a car-crash victim from falling into what could have been a life-threatening, or at the very least, life-altering coma.
On the surface, there haven’t been many of Damon’s films that you could look at and reasonably say have that kind of transformative power. Maybe Good Will Hunting inspired some youngsters to dream of Harvard, maybe The Martian made them want to be astronauts, albeit much less stranded ones, and maybe the Bourne franchise made them want to become a government-sponsored assassin.
Titan AE can’t have been the driving force behind any aspiring animators chasing their dream, since it flopped so hard that it killed a studio, and it seems reasonable to assume that The Last Duel didn’t convince anyone to take up jousting, or that The Great Wall caused an increase in international tourism.
However, had the fates aligned even slightly differently, you could even say that Damon’s involvement was the only reason an unfortunate woman avoided a comatose state. He wasn’t on the call sheet, but as a favour to a friend, the Academy Award winner made the best use of his geographical proximity by heading from the set of The Brothers Grimm to shoot a quick cameo while he was already in Prague.
Two Hollywood productions were shooting in the city at the same time, and since the other one was being written by his old college friends, Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer, he used his free time away from Terry Gilliam’s fantasy blockbuster to shoot one of his many gratuitous cameos in EuroTrip as Donny.
To this day, despite the number of acclaimed, award-winning, and smash hit films he’s been in, Damon has confessed that two of the things he gets shouted at him in the street the most are Team America‘s, “Matt Daaaaaaaaaaaamon,” and the title of his unfairly catchy EuroTrip ditty, ‘Scotty Doesn’t Know’.
What Matt Damon may not know is that the song is a literal lifesaver, as Nick Cloutman, whose band, Lustra, performed the song before the A-lister lip-synced it, revealed. “There was this girl, I want to say in the Midwest or Indiana, it was her friend contacting us,” the musician recalled. “She said her friend was in a car with some other people to get pizza, and the car got t-boned.”
Not an ideal situation, but even though he wasn’t there, Damon rode to the rescue. “This girl was dragged out of the car by paramedics, and was put on a stretcher, and ultimately went into a coma,” Cloutman continued. “As she was slipping into this coma, her phone started ringing, and she had the ‘Scotty Doesn’t Know’ ringtone. In her dazed state, she started singing along to it.”
Would the scene have become as popular were it not for Damon prowling the stage in EuroTrip? Probably not. Would the woman have had it as her ringtone, and thus been saved from a coma, had he not played Donny? Again, probably not. “It’s one of those things,” Cloutman conceded. “You don’t consider you’re going to be attached to something that has this positive meaning for people.”
He played his part, but so did the movie’s unannounced guest star.
