At 36, Matt Damon has the boyish, square-cut good looks of a comic-book hero – the classical kind that doesn’t wallow in anxiety or neurosis. He has developed a media persona as an All-American guy: go-getting and idealistic, but with a hip, wry streak and an iconoclastic attitude toward everything, including his own success.
Asked why he hasn’t become a romantic hero, he says, “Hey, I just became a movie father for the first time in ‘Syriana.’ I’ve got to knock these things down one at a time.”
Damon’s relaxed intelligence and humor make him a pleasure to be around even when he’s playing heroes or tightly wound antiheroes.
Edward Norton, his co-star in the cult gambling favorite “Rounders” – a virtual paean to Damon’s poker face – remembers that production as one of the happiest and easiest in his career, and he calls Damon “just a stone-cold good actor. He’s incredibly agile. You can go over here or over there, and he’s right with you.”
Even people who haven’t worked with Damon think they know him and think they like him. But he specializes in playing men who don’t know who they are and have a big fat hole in their identity.
It’s his air of mystery or mischief, not his wholesomeness, that’s sustained his career and propelled him from being the noble male ingenue of “Geronimo: An American Legend” and “The Rainmaker” and “Saving Private Ryan” to the quick-witted dirty cop in “The Departed” and now the super-
secretive career CIA officer in “The Good Shepherd.”
In fact, he’s created a new screen archetype for himself: the unhappy-go-lucky guy, often thwarted in his effort to find out who he is or who he can be.
“I guess that is something you can see in my work,” he says. “But it’s not something I’ve been conscious of. And a lot of movies, plays and fiction are about the quest for self.”
Somehow, Damon the on- screen question mark and Damon the off-screen good guy bleed into each other, and his producers think that’s a good thing – even for his portrayal of a daunting CIA co-founder who starts as a fresh-faced idealist and becomes trapped in a life of betrayal and mistrust.
James Robinson, the head of Morgan Creek productions, says this latest antihero is “a quiet, smart, still-waters-run- deep type of person. That’s who Matt Damon is.”
Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro’s partner in TriBeca productions, says, “Matt is a really nice guy and that comes through, so you have an empathy for this character … .”
And Damon agrees. “So many of my best roles have come from people casting against what they think people expect of me.”
That includes Jason Bourne, the hit man in “The Bourne Identity” and “The Bourne Supremacy,” who regained his humanity after losing his memory – and became the center of an enormous international movie franchise.
Damon says it’s “kind of cool” that the makers of the James Bond films, the big daddy of all spy-movie franchises, have cited the Bourne movies as influences on “Casino Royale.”
For “The Good Shepherd,” De Niro was always telling him, “leave people time to read into things, to think about them.” That connected with ideas Damon had been developing about movie acting.
“Oftentimes the difference between being the leading man and being a character actor is knowing when the more you show, the more you’re doing a disservice to the film,” he says. “You don’t want to do the work for the audience. You have to know when you need to show your hand a little and when to back off.”
Damon went to Harvard to study English and American Literature in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The actor never graduated. But Walter Hill cast me in ‘Geronimo’ with three weeks to go in my last semester. And Harvard said I had to take my finals the same moment they were being offered in Cambridge. Here I was the low man on the totem pole on this big Western that wasn’t about to stop for three-hour breaks on four separate days.”
Having grown up in Cambridge’s Central Square when it was still a dicey neighborhood, he felt equally at home in the realms of town and gown.
Ever since, his ability to bridge worlds with his ready intelligence and humor has given him a taste for variety. Of course, it informed his work on “Good Will Hunting,” a close collaboration with Ben Affleck, another Cambridge lad with divorced parents and a teacher mother. (Damon’s was a professor of early childhood education at Lesley College.) Affleck and Damon shared the Oscar for best screenplay; Damon also got nominated for best actor.
Affleck initially looked more like leading-man material. But his appearance in frank commercial ventures and some much-derided flops whittled away his aesthetic street cred and undercut his stardom.
Damon chose more carefully. He didn’t turn himself into an action figure with six-pack abs until he saw the prospect of transforming Jason Bourne into a character with compassion and command. He considers these cutting-edge espionage movies his “Get Out of Jail Free” cards.
