The movie that saved Matt Damon’s career: “It would have been a big problem”
Don’t be fooled if you see an actor making it big – it doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed to stick around.
The problem is, Hollywood is one of the most unstable industries to be a part of, and even if you’ve earned Oscars or starred in blockbuster hits, you’re still not safe. This is something that Matt Damon came to realise well after he rose to fame, suddenly coming face to face with a career on the rocks.
After landing some small roles in the late 1980s (you can even see him starring alongside Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza, where he made his feature film debut), Damon finally hit the big time when a screenplay he was working on with his buddy Ben Affleck was taken on by director Gus Van Sant, resulting in the hugely successful Good Will Hunting.
With Damon and Affleck also starring in the film alongside acting legend Robin Williams, the movie acted as a breakthrough moment for the pair. They’d finally made it into the big leagues, walking away with a ‘Best Screenplay’ Oscar while Damon also earned a nomination for ‘Best Actor’. From that moment on, Damon had entered a new rank in Hollywood, subsequently starring as the titular character in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, among other popular hits.
Perhaps his greatest box office exploit came in the dominating form of Jason Bourne, though. With him, he became an all-action hero and arguably helped to redefine the genre. Damon managed to bring a sense of realism to the action genre that had felt lost for decades, and with it, he became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Age comes for us all, and in the 2010s Damon was beginning to move toward a grey-haired positon, and wondered if could he still bring i the box office takings for his action movies? Were his career choices as smart as before? He wasn’t having as many hits as he did in the 2000s, and he admitted to The New York Times that he began to feel as though he “was in real peril”.
For the first time in his life, Damon began to worry that he was being cast out of Hollywood. Was his time finally up? The thing is, new actors emerge every year – younger and perhaps more suited for certain roles – and then actors as esteemed as Damon run the risk of having their careers slowly taken away from them. That’s just the nature of the game.
“No one can tell you exactly who’s on the List,” he explained, “It’s constantly changing month to month, and nobody has ever seen it. But you want to be on it.” Luckily, a movie arrived just in the nick of time. It screeched to a halt, opened its door and provided him with just the lift he needed to get himself back into the driving seat.
Damon can breathe a sigh of relief that Ford v Ferrari was a success because if “that hadn’t worked,” he believes that “it would have been a big problem for me.” While that feels a little too far removed from the reality of Damon’s talents, there is no doubt that Hollywood is a fickle business, and this one success should sustain him for a while.
