How one co-star inspired the “40-year growth curve” of Matt Damon’s career: “I took a lot away from that”
For someone who bet their entire career on instant self-gratification, Matt Damon sure knows how to play the long game, a trick that he picked up almost three decades ago from a co-star who’d made it to the top without compromising their principles.
The aforementioned self-gratification might feel like a misnomer, since Good Will Hunting was Damon’s tenth appearance in a feature, but the only reason it took so long was that he and Ben Affleck were adamant that they wouldn’t sell the script unless they starred in it themselves.
By the time it was eventually released in December 1997, he’d already headlined the star-studded cast of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rainmaker and made an impression with minimal screen time in Courage Under Fire, so he wasn’t quite a complete unknown coming out of nowhere to win an Academy Award.
At the same time, the platonic life partners had been nurturing their screenplay for years, and they were so confident that it was the key to unlocking the doors that had been locked shut in their careers thus far that the only way they’d ever hand it over to a studio was if they were guaranteed the leading roles.
It was a gambit that paid off handsomely, much to Steven Spielberg’s chagrin, since he cast Damon in Saving Private Ryan because of his unknown qualities, only for the title character to end up being played by one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising young stars by the time it premiered in the summer of 1998.
The production also taught the actor an important lesson, one that he’s carried with him ever since. Shortly after Spielberg’s war epic hit cinemas, Damon referred to his burgeoning career as “a 40-year growth curve,” a mindset he’d adopted after working with Tom Hanks.
“He will never take a movie that’s not in his heart,” he told The Tampa Bay Times. “Tom has passed on movies that did huge business, but he will say he couldn’t do it because it wasn’t his passion. I took a lot away from that. It has to be in your heart. It’s like Tom has a contract with every single ticket buyer. They know he is honouring his contract every time, that he’s not just out for the payday.”
Hanks turned down Field of Dreams, Groundhog Day, Jerry Maguire, and The Shawshank Redemption for those reasons, and it didn’t do a thing to stop him from becoming a two-time Oscar winner and one of his era’s most in-demand leading men. Damon’s instincts have generally been solid, which is why he hasn’t been left with many regrets.
He dodged two Affleck-shaped bullets when he rejected Daredevil and Paycheck, backed out of Batman Forever and Brokeback Mountain, and vetoed The Majestic, to name a few. 2028 will mark the 40th anniversary of his big-screen debut in Mystic Pizza, and all things considered, he’s done a stellar job of living up to the mantra he’d vowed to follow three decades previously.
