The “unhelpful” advice Matt Damon gave Josh Hartnett for ‘Oppenheimer’
Actors pass on advice to each other all the time, but the words of wisdom Matt Damon bestowed upon Josh Hartnett came a little too late after he’d gone ahead and done it anyway.
The two played major roles in Christopher Nolan’s Academy-Award winning ‘Best Picture’, Oppenheimer, with Damon providing the erstwhile comic relief as deadpan military general Leslie Groves, while Hartnett was the affable exposition machine and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Ernest Lawrence.
It was Hartnett’s biggest role in a mainstream Hollywood movie for several years, and because he was playing a real person, the actor decided to work to resemble his counterpart more closely. To do so, he gained a few pounds to help fill out his more slender frame.
Unfortunately, when he encountered Damon on set, the Oscar-winner told him it wasn’t the smartest idea at his age, and it’s an arena in which he has particular expertise after once dropping so much weight for his part in Courage Under Fire that it took his body two years to turn to normal.
Hartnett prefaced his comments by saying that Damon “gave me a lot of good advice,” but some of it should have been relayed earlier. “One thing that was just so unhelpful, he told me not to gain the weight I’d already gained for the role,” the actor admitted on The Tonight Show.
“I gained about 30 pounds for the role and he was like, ‘You’re never going to get that off again, man,'” Hartnett lamented. “He’s like, ‘You’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to get that weight off and it’s never going to come off because your body’s going to want to get that weight back on.”
It wasn’t just a one-time thing, either, with Damon doing wonders for Hartnett’s body image and self-consciousness by reminding him of that fact repeatedly “over the course of the production.” Needless to say, his colleague was less than thrilled about being bashed over the head with his bad decision-making.
“I was like, ‘Thanks, Matt,'” Hartnett deadpanned. “Thanks for telling me this now. I’ve already gained it.” However, one potential positive is that it could theoretically give him renewed belief to shift that excess Oppenheimer poundage if he hasn’t already. Given his own difficulties recovering from extreme weight loss, however, Damon was clearly trying to be helpful and not malicious.
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