Matt Damon Is Having a Big Movie Year Thanks to ‘Air’ and ‘Oppenheimer’
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1970-present
Who Is Matt Damon?
Actor Matt Damon’s career took off after starring in and co-writing Good Will Hunting, which earned him the 1997 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, along with his friend and fellow co-writer Ben Affleck. Damon has since acted in a wide range of movies, including Saving Private Ryan, Ocean’s Eleven, The Departed, and The Martian. He became an unlikely action hero after being cast as Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity and its sequels, which were major commercial successes. Damon has several new movies for 2023: Air, about the creation of Michael Jordan’s Nike shoe line; Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer about the father of the atomic bomb; and Drive-Away Dolls, a comedy from Ethan Coen due this September.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Matthew Paige Damon
BORN: October 8, 1970
BIRTHPLACE: Cambridge, Massachusetts
SPOUSE: Luciana Bozán Barroso (2005-present)
CHILDREN: Alexia, Isabella, Gia, and Stella
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Libra
Early Life: Family and Meeting Ben Affleck
Matthew Paige Damon was born on October 8, 1970, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Kent, worked in finance and real estate, while his mother, Nancy, was a professor in early childhood education. He has one brother, Kyle, who is three years older than him. Damon’s parents divorced when he was a toddler. As a child, Damon often felt lonely and like he didn’t belong, and he was particularly self-conscious about his short height at the time. (Damon grew to 5-foot-10 as an adult.)
At 10 years old, Damon met a kid living two blocks down the road: Ben Affleck. The pair became fast friends. They played baseball (both are die-hard Boston Red Sox fans) and the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons as well as enjoyed catching movie double-features together. Affleck has said he probably wouldn’t have become an actor if not for Damon: “Matt gave acting a framework, an integration into the social hierarchy at school... Before Matt, I was by myself. Acting was a solo activity where I’d just go off and do something, act in a little TV show or something, and no one understood it.”
They both attended the Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, a public high school with many notable alumni, including poet E.E. Cummings, composer Leroy Anderson, and basketball star Patrick Ewing. Other students described them as “drama geeks” and said they “weren’t considered cool kids,” according to People. After graduating, Damon studied English at Harvard University, where he wrote a 40-page script for a playwriting class that served as an early draft for what later became Good Will Hunting. He dropped out of Harvard 12 credits shy of graduation to pursue his acting career.
Early Movies: 'Good Will Hunting' Breakout
Damon made his big-screen debut at age 18 with a brief appearance in 1988’s Mystic Pizza, but since the earliest years of their careers, he and Affleck have appeared in films together. Their first joint feature was School Ties (1992), a drama set in a 1950s prep school. They stayed next to a dump in Lowell, Massachusetts, during filming. “We literally were next to a dump and thought we were kings,” Affleck told Entertainment Weekly.
Damon gained early praise for his performance as a drug-addicted soldier in Courage Under Fire (1996), a role for which he lost 40 pounds in 100 days. He also had a starring role in the 1997 Francis Ford Coppola movie The Rainmaker, which was adapted from a John Grisham novel.
Affleck and Damon were roommates when they wrote the screenplay for Good Will Hunting (1997) together. Affleck read and liked the 40-page script that Damon had started in college and felt the two should finish it together. Damon shared the story with Interview magazine:
“He looked at it and said, ‘This is really good. We should write this together.’ And I said, ‘I know, but I don’t know where it should go.’ And he said, ‘I don’t either,’ but we agreed to write it.”
The finished product became an acclaimed film directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Damon as an an M.I.T. janitor who is actually a gifted mathematician. The film received nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Damon’s Best Actor nod, and Robin Williams’ Best Supporting Actor win. Damon and Affleck also won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, which led to a memorable, high-energy acceptance speech.
Next, Damon appeared in the title role of Steven Spielberg’s World War II film Saving Private Ryan (1998) as a U.S. Army private who must be located and rescued by a detachment led by Tom Hanks’ character. Spielberg cast Damon because he was impressed by his acting skills and he wanted an anonymous actor in the part—he didn’t anticipate Damon becoming an overnight celebrity with the success of Good Will Hunting.
Damon continued making high-profile projects from the end of the decade into the new millennium, with films that included Rounders (1998), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Dogma (1999), All the Pretty Horses (2000), and the Ocean’s Eleven series.
Action Stardom as Jason Bourne
Previously known for his dramatic roles, Damon became an unlikely action hero after being cast in the lead role in the 2002 movie The Bourne Identity. He portrayed Jason Bourne, a secret agent suffering from amnesia who attempts to recall his identity while unraveling a clandestine conspiracy within the CIA. The film’s director Doug Liman said of casting Damon:
“When I sat down with Matt and explained that I wanted to take on an action movie but do it in a different way, I got the sense that he understood. He was coming from the same place I was coming from, and I felt we could become partners on this.”
Damon performed several of his own stunts and underwater scenes for The Bourne Identity, undergoing three months of training in hand-to-hand combat, weapons, boxing, and Filipino escrima to get into shape for the role. Although many Hollywood insiders predicted the film would flop, The Bourne Identity became a critical and commercial success, as were its sequels The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). The $110 million Bourne Ultimatum had the largest August opening weekend in movie history, earning an estimated $70.2 million of business in the United States and Canada, until the release of 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
Although Damon didn’t return for the 2012 sequel The Bourne Legacy, he reprised the role in Jason Bourne (2016), the fifth installment of the series. It received mixed reviews from critics but was a box office hit around the world.
A-List Movie Star: 'The Martian,' 'Thor' Cameo, and More
Damon starred alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in the Martin Scorsese–directed crime film The Departed (2006), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2007, Damon was named Hollywood’s most bankable movie star by Forbes, which noted that his films averaged $29 at the box office for every dollar he earned. He appeared in many well-regarded films around this time, including Syriana (2005), The Good Shepherd (2006), The Informant! (2009), True Grit (2010), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and Contagion (2011). Damon earned his second Oscar nomination for his supporting role as rugby great Francois Pienaar in the South African film Invictus (2009), directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela.
Elsewhere onscreen, Damon tackled family-friendly fare with We Bought a Zoo (2011), environmental drama in Promised Land (2012) with co-star John Krasinski, and science fiction with Jodie Foster in Elysium (2013). Damon then earned raves for his turn as Liberace’s boyfriend Scott Thorson in the critically acclaimed HBO movie Behind the Candelabra (2013), starring Michael Douglas. For the part, Damon received both Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.
Damon also had a major hit with the fall 2015 release of The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott and co-starring Jessica Chastain and Chiwetel Ejiofor, among others. Based on the 2011 Andy Weir novel, the movie depicts the travails of an astronaut who becomes stranded on Mars while chronicling efforts on Earth to facilitate his rescue. Receiving an avalanche of positive reviews, The Martian earned almost $600 million worldwide. Both the film and Damon received Golden Globe awards (Damon for Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy), and he also earned an Oscar nomination.
The year after The Martian, Damon appeared in Downsizing, Suburbicon, and Thor: Ragnarok. Damon’s brief appearance in Thor: Ragnarok was a much-celebrated cameo in which he played an actor in a stage play portraying Thor’s brother, Loki. His more recent leading roles include Stillwater (2021) and Ford v Ferrari (2019), in which he played automotive designer Carroll Shelby, alongside Christian Bale as driver Ken Miles.
The Affleck and Damon bromance continued to thrive into the 2010s. The two presented at the 2017 Oscars together, produced the Emmy-nominated documentary series Project Greenlight, participated in an ongoing fake feud with comedian Jimmy Kimmel, and won the “Guys of the Decade” award at Spike TV’s Guys’ Choice Awards. The pair reunited in the 2023 film Air, which portrayed the true story behind the Air Nike shoe line. Damon played marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro, while Affleck portrayed Nike CEO Phil Knight.
New Movies: 'Oppenheimer' and 'Drive-Away Dolls'
In Christopher Nolan’s 2023 summer blockbuster Oppenheimer, Damon portrays Leslie Groves, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officer who oversaw the Manhattan Project. The movie centers on physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, who led the Project’s scientific side and the creation of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer releases in theaters on July 21.
This fall, Damon is set to appear in the comedy film Drive-Away Dolls, directed by Ethan Coen. It tells the story of two friends (played by Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan) on a road trip who find themselves in possession of a stolen briefcase that had been lost by several criminals, one of whom will be played by Damon. Drive-Away Dolls is scheduled for a theatrical release on September 22.
Wife and Kids
Damon married his longtime girlfriend, Luciana Bozán Barroso, in December 2005 in New York City Hall. They met while he was shooting the comedy film Stuck On You (2003) in Miami, where she was working as a bartender. Barroso is Argentinian.
The couple has four daughters: Alexia, from Barroso’s prior marriage; Isabella, born in June 2006; Gia Zavala, born in August 2008; and Stella Zavala, born in October 2010. When Damon isn’t filming on location, he lives with his family in Miami.
In 2007, Damon was named the Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine. A surprised Damon said “all the campaigning” by pals George Clooney and Brad Pitt, who’d each won the honor twice, had finally paid off. “You gave an aging suburban dad the ego boost of a lifetime,” he said in a letter published in the magazine. “My 9-year-old stepdaughter now thinks I’m cool—well, cooler.”
Net Worth
Damon is estimated to have a net worth of about $170 million. The Jason Bourne films alone grossed more than $1.6 billion, with Damon earning $10 million for the first movie and about $26 million for each subsequent film. Damon’s earning power has also been boosted by his work as a producer, as well as an actor. For instance, he served as a producer for the 2016 drama Manchester by the Sea, which was nominated for six Academy Awards.
Film director James Cameron wanted Damon to star in his 2009 epic science fiction film Avatar, offering the actor 10 percent of the film’s box office profits, but Damon turned down the part to complete the original Bourne trilogy. Avatar went on to gross $2.9 billion, making it one of the most profitable films in history. Damon said of rejecting the part: “I will go down in history. You will never meet an actor who turned down more money.”
#MeToo Controversy
In late 2017, Damon found himself mired in controversy over the onset of sexual harassment allegations that derailed many powerful men in the movie industry. He was accused of trying to kill a story about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory actions in 2004, which he denied. The actor drew further fire when he told Business Insider he would consider working with an accused sexual predator “on a case-by-case basis,” and telling Peter Travers of ABC News, “We’re going to have to figure— you know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?”
In January 2018, Damon expressed regret for his earlier comments. “I really wish I’d listened a lot more before I weighed in on this. I don’t want to further anybody’s pain with anything that I do or say. So for that I am really sorry... I should get in the back seat and close my mouth for a while.”
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