The one actor Matt Damon modelled his entire career on: “The goal”
As much as every actor wants to carve out their own path to success, it doesn’t help to look to the past for inspiration. Matt Damon may have struck Hollywood gold as an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, but he took his on-camera cues from one of the all-time greats.
Good Will Hunting did earn him a ‘Best Actor’ nomination, but it was his win for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ alongside Ben Affleck that launched Damon into the mainstream. It was a case of one hand feeding the other, with the pair’s insistence that they would only sell the script if they could star in the movie transforming him from a jobbing actor into a hot commodity overnight.
He’d already been working for almost a decade at that point, but almost destroying himself physically to blow away Denzel Washington in Courage Under Fire was the closest he’d come to a genuine breakthrough performance. After Good Will Hunting, he knew it was time to make hay while the sun was shining.
While Affleck sought to become a movie star, Damon wanted to work with the best directors. That led him to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rainmaker, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley, and Robert Redford’s The Legend of Bagger Vance, even if there’s no small hint of irony to Doug Liman’s bone-crunching The Bourne Identity saving him from the scrapheap.
For the last three decades, Damon has been one of the best at filling one of Hollywood’s most unsung positions: he’s an A-list star who can comfortably headline a movie, but he’s also a character actor who has no issues ceding the spotlight, or even playing minor and uncredited cameo roles to either lend a favour to a filmmaking friend, tick another name off his list, or simply for shits and giggles.
There was no concerted effort or conscious decision to become a jack of all trades, with Damon telling GQ that as far as career precedents go, there was only one person he wanted to emulate. “I always thought the goal was William Holden,” he said. “To just be in a lot of good movies.”
Holden certainly did that, with the ‘Golden Age’ icon appearing in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Sabrina, and Stalag 17, David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Sydney Lumet’s Network, George Cukor’s Born Yesterday, and Robert Wise’s Executive Suite, to name just a few.
Damon may not have been in as many certified classics, but it’s easy to see how he’s tried to follow Holden’s path. Both of them spent have spent their peak years in high demand among the industry’s most prominent auteurs, and The Towering Inferno and When Time Ran Out showed that the latter wasn’t averse to the good and bad sides of blockbuster cinema, much like the former with the Bourne franchise and The Great Wall.
They’re both Oscar winners with three nominations for acting, Damon’s only Emmy nomination for a leading role was in the same category Holden won his, and neither of them enjoy the celebrity trappings that come with being a successful actor. With that in mind, he’s been doing a pretty good job of following his inspiration’s path.
