The only director who could convince Matt Damon to play a superhero: “I would be in”
The closest Matt Damon has come to playing a superhero in his career was his hilarious cameos as a feckless Asgardian actor playing Tom Hiddleston’s Loki in Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder.
According to Damon, he agreed to these brief appearances as a bit of fun and a favour to his pal, Chris Hemsworth.
Naturally, though, because superhero movies have been the biggest thing in Hollywood for more than two decades, the industry has attempted to convince Damon to don spandex on several occasions. He was approached by Marvel about playing the villainous Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home, for instance, but he turned it down, and Jake Gyllenhaal played the role instead. Similarly, Christopher Nolan sought him to play Harvey Dent, also known as the tragic Two-Face, in The Dark Knight, but because the role was fairly minor in the original script, he passed. Aaron Eckhart wound up taking up that mantle.
Undoubtedly, the closest Damon came to agreeing to make a superhero picture was in the early ’00s, though. Fox and Marvel approached him about Daredevil, the blind vigilante who works as a New York City lawyer by day and a red, devil-suit-clad costumed adventurer at night. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man had just struck box office gold for Sony, and Fox wanted in on that action, seeing Daredevil as the best bet.
To the studio’s delight, Damon was interested because he grew up a massive fan of the character. Indeed, the Bourne Identity star once told The Daily News that he and best pal Ben Affleck both loved ‘The Man Without Fear’, as he was nicknamed in the comics.
“It was always Daredevil — that’s the comic we read when we were kids,” Damon remembered. “But when that one came along, I chickened out, because I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t seen the director’s work, and I didn’t know. So I just said, ‘No’.” Interestingly, Affleck mustn’t have had the same qualms as his friend, because when Damon turned the role down, the producers quickly turned to him, and he admitted, “I gotta do it.”
Ultimately, Affleck regretted signing up to Daredevil because the movie didn’t turn out as he or writer/director Mark Steven Johnson intended. In fact, he once confessed to Playboy, “It just kills me. I love that story, that character. And the fact that it got fucked up the way it did stays with me.”
As the years went on, and Damon solidified his status as one of the few preeminent Hollywood A-listers who had never joined a superhero universe, he was asked what it would take to make him finally pull the trigger. Fascinatingly, he revealed it would take a combination of two factors: a chance to make good on Daredevil, and one specific director. “If Chris Nolan came up to me and said, ‘I want to do Daredevil,’ I would be in,” Damon revealed with a smile.
In truth, this answer made perfect sense. Damon isn’t opposed to superhero movies as a rule, but if he were to make one, he’d want to satisfy his emotional connection to his favourite character from childhood. He’d also like the film to be the best it could be, and who better, in that regard, to helm the project than Nolan, the man who rebooted Batman in 2005, leading to the all-conquering Dark Knight Trilogy?
To most casual observers, Nolan’s three Batman movies are the very best the genre has to offer, and Damon clearly feels the same. There’s also the plausible idea that he regretted missing out on being a part of The Dark Knight and would jump at the chance for a do-over.
In the meantime, though, he’s been having a ball being a part of Nolan’s regular cadre of actors, having first worked with the director in 2014’s Interstellar, which he followed up with 2023’s Oppenheimer, and the lead role in the upcoming The Odyssey.
