Matt Damon told his wife he’d break from acting unless “Nolan called”
While discreetly sidestepping the intimate details of his marriage, Matt Damon has recently disclosed that he had made a solemn vow to his wife that he would only take a hiatus from acting on the condition that if Christopher Nolan reached out to him, the break would go on hold.
His wife agreed to the condition – and then, as fate would have it, Nolan called to offer Damon a part in the upcoming Oppenheimer. Nolan called Damon to offer him the role of Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project.
Groves, known for his pivotal role in selecting Los Alamos, N.M., as a testing site for the development of the atomic bomb, personally handpicked J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) to spearhead the project at Los Alamos. This decision stirred controversy, given Oppenheimer’s absence of a Nobel Prize and limited administrative leadership experience, making it a divisive choice at the time.
“This is going to sound made up, but it’s actually true,” Damon told Entertainment Weekly. “I had — not to get too personal — negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off. I had been in Interstellar and then Chris put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation, but I actually negotiated in couples therapy — this is a true story — the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called. This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you. He just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household.”
The film’s lead, Cillian Murphy, had a similar experience. Much like Damon’s experience, Murphy was unaware Nolan’s project was in the works until he received a phone call.
“Chris’ way of operating is that he just calls you out of the blue,” says Murphy. “I genuinely had no idea. He said he was making a movie about Oppenheimer and he said, ‘I’d like you to play Oppenheimer.’ I had to sit down. It was kind of overwhelming.”
This is an approach Nolan himself knows to be risky. “[It’s] a fun way to do it,” says the director. “But it means that it’s very difficult to call [Murphy] to go out to dinner or something. Because every time [he] answer[s] the phone, it’s like, what’s it going to be?”.
Oppenheimer will be released in all theatres on June 21st.
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