The scene Matt Damon called the “toughest two weeks” of his entire career
Matt Damon is a name on a lot of people’s lips once again after the trailer to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey dropped last week, a film which will surely be insanely epic, break all box office records and underline Nolan’s place as the eminent director of our time. He is doing things nobody else does, and on a scale never seen before.
Damon is becoming one of Nolan’s favoured actors after his role in 2023’s multi-award winning nuclear epic Oppenheimer and the mind-bending 2014 smash Interstellar, and the director has recently told of his amazement at what Damon brought to The Odyssey, which will land in cinemas in July 2026, saying that he was shocked at just how good the actor’s performance was in shooting the film.
But then Damon is an unusually talented movie star; very few people win an Oscar for their first screenplay, and even fewer are also Academy Award-nominated for their acting in that film, but Damon did it with Good Will Hunting almost 30 years ago, and he’s still only 55. Since then, he has been in almost every kind of movie imaginable, usually in a leading role, meaning he is one of the few actors Hollywood trusts implicitly to carry a massive budget.
He has collected three more Oscar nominations in his career, in addition to winning a Golden Globe for 2016’s The Martian, and has appeared in a fairly dizzying range of movies, from Marvel superhero fare like Thor to a Farrelly brothers comedy in Stuck on You, to his own Bond-aping Jason Bourne franchise.
But one of his most challenging roles was for a little-remembered (but big-budget) sci-fi movie called Elysium from 2013, which served as South African director Neill Blomkamp’s follow-up to the superb District 9 and was by no means a bad film, featuring some very prescient social commentary in addition to action scenes and the always-good Jodie Foster.
Filming the movie wasn’t the easiest experience for Damon, however, who had to bulk up, shave his head and cover his body with various temporary tattoos to play a former criminal on parole in an Earth gone to ruin set almost 150 years in the future. In fact, it involved being literally covered in shit on a regular basis.
He explained, “Yeah, that was a running joke with the crew. Like any dump anywhere in the world, the dust is, in large part, faecal matter. So at the end of the day, we would wipe this stuff off and basically throw shitty towels at each other. We also had a location within the dump that we called Poo River. It was like, ‘OK, can we get everyone down to Poo River?’ (It was)probably the toughest two weeks of shooting I’ve ever had.”
Elysium didn’t flop at the box office, but perhaps due to a non-explanatory name and some confusion about the subject matter, it didn’t do quite as well as it might have. It also wasn’t the only sci-fi movie Damon made that year, he also had a small role in Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem, which absolutely nobody remembers, before he went on the insane run of Interstellar, The Martian and Jason Bourne over the following three years.
Aside from the new Nolan blockbuster, Damon has a film coming up called The Rip alongside his long-term best mate and confidant Ben Affleck, about Miami cops who discover a huge stash of money and panic over what to do with it, hitting Netflix on January 16th, 2026.
