The role Matt Damon called the pinnacle of his career: “To me, this is the dream job”
Sometimes, an actor spends years thinking about the dream role they’ve always wanted to play before it happens. On other occasions, they don’t even notice it until they’re on set, with Matt Damon wasting little time in realising he’d walked into a part that gave him everything he wanted and more.
Unfortunately for him, and everyone else involved in making it, the people footing the bill didn’t share his enthusiasm. Even though the production was helmed by an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and headlined by two Oscar-winning performers, it barely saw the inside of a cinema.
It wasn’t an ideal scenario, but it’s not as if Damon isn’t used to being the underdog. He and Ben Affleck launched their mainstream careers by betting on themselves and refusing to let anyone take their Good Will Hunting screenplay away from them unless they acted in it themselves, and it would be an understatement to say their perseverance has paid off in the long run.
At the turn of the millennium, the star recognised that his time in the spotlight was in danger of petering out after a succession of back-to-back bombs, so he threw caution to the wind and decided to try his luck at becoming an action hero. The end result was The Bourne Identity, and Damon has acknowledged that Doug Liman’s spy thriller single-handedly saved him from the Hollywood scrapheap.
On paper, Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra wasn’t too risky a proposition. After all, biopics had been all the rage for decades and were virtually guaranteed to enter the awards season conversation, but the subject matter was “too gay” for any major studios to cough up the cash, as the director put it, even though Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain was a critical and commercial triumph.
Neither Michael Douglas nor Damon had any trepidation over playing Liberace and Scott Thorson, respectively, with the latter calling it the role of a lifetime. “No, no, not at all,” he told Today when asked if he had any concerns. “To me, this is the dream job. It’s a chance to be in the front row while Michael turns in this amazing performance.”
“We played it as a very deep love affair,” he explained. “You know, it was a marriage in a lot of ways for these guys.” It was also the first time in almost two decades that Damon had played a real person, and digging into Thorson’s complex relationship with Liberace was a completely different challenge from his supporting role as Britton Davis in 1993’s Geronimo: An American Legend.
Behind the Candelabra did hit the big screen in the United Kingdom and several other markets, but in the United States, it was consigned to HBO, where it promptly became the most-watched made-for-television feature broadcast on the network in nine years, indicating that there was an audience there after all, regardless of what the studio heads thought when Soderbergh first pitched them the project.
Douglas also won the Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film’ and the Primetime Emmy for ‘Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie’, and Damon was thrilled for his co-star, even though he’d been nominated in the same category on both accounts.
