The most challenging role of Matt Damon’s career: “I did what I thought I had to do”
Although it would be a stretch to call Matt Damon a method actor, part of the reason why he’s never fallen completely in love with dedicating himself fully to his craft might be down to what happened one of the first times that he did.
Co-writing the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting alongside lifelong best friend Ben Affleck and playing the title role may have strapped a rocket to his back and launched him to the heights he’s refused to come down from ever since, but Damon was already an experienced performer by then.
He made his feature-length debut in Julia Roberts’ rom-com Mystic Pizza, was an uncredited extra in Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams, took second billing behind Brendan Fraser in the powerful drama School Ties, appeared in Walter Hill’s historical epic Geronimo: An American Legend alongside Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall, and partnered with Kevin Smith for the first time on Chasing Amy, all before his breakthrough movie had been released.
None of them required Damon to go to serious physical and psychological lengths to get into character, although the same can’t be said of 1993’s Courage Under Fire. Edward Zwick’s military thriller finds Denzel Washington’s investigator digging into the death of Meg Ryan’s captain, who was killed in action when her unit was attempting to rescue the survivors of a downed helicopter.
Playing the gaunt medic Andrew Ilario, Damon lost so much weight that once he’d finished shooting his scenes, he ended up under medical supervision. Not only that but he was placed on a course of prescribed medication for two years after the film had wrapped in an effort to course-correct the damage he’d done to his body.
Understandably, then, Damon named it “the most challenging role that I’ve ever had” during a Reddit AMA. “I had to lose all the weight that I lost on my own, that was the most physically challenging thing I’ve ever had to do in my life.” Admitting that 139 pounds “is not a natural weight for me,” the star outlined that he didn’t even have the benefit of professional supervision.
“The hard part was the diet, all I ate was chicken breast,” he explained. “It’s not like I had a chef or anything, I just made it up and did what I thought I had to do. I just made it up, and that was incredibly challenging.” Considering that it literally took him years to recover, it may not have been the smartest move in hindsight to take such drastic measures, but it can’t be denied that he looked the part.
Since then, fluctuating weight hasn’t really been one of Damon’s tools of the trade, and it’s easy to see why.
