Matt Damon

• 1. Introduction

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  Matt Damon once turned down 10 percent of the profits from Avatar, a film that went on to become the most successful of all time. Director James Cameron made the offer while Damon was still working on the Bourne films, and Damon did not want to break his contract. Years later he said, "I will go down in history... you will never meet an actor who turned down more money." Few performers can walk away from a fortune and still find their phones ringing. How did the American actor, producer and screenwriter reach a position where that was even a choice? Who helped him get there? And what does he do with all that fame?

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• 2. Cambridge Roots

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  Matthew Paige Damon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 8th of October 1970. He was the second son of Kent Telfer Damon, a stockbroker, and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, who taught early childhood education at Lesley University. His father had English and Scottish ancestry. His mother is of Finnish and Swedish descent, and her family surname was changed from Pajari to Paige.

  When Damon was two years old, his parents divorced. The family had spent two years in Newton, and afterward he and his brother returned with their mother to Cambridge. They lived in a six-family communal house. His brother, Kyle, grew up to be a sculptor and artist.

  At Cambridge Alternative School and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, Damon was a good student. He has said that as a teenager he felt lonely, as if he did not belong. His mother's by-the-book approach to child-rearing, he felt, made it hard for him to define his own identity.

  Gerry Speca, his drama teacher, gets credit from Damon for a major artistic influence. Damon adds, wryly, that Speca handed his close friend and schoolmate Ben Affleck the "biggest roles and longest speeches". Damon himself acted in several high-school theater productions.

  Damon entered Harvard University in 1988 as a member of the class of 1992 and lived in Lowell House. On campus he appeared in student productions of Burn This and A... My Name is Alice. He also joined the Delphic Club, one of the university's Final Clubs.

  In 1992 he left Harvard a semester short, missing 12 credits toward a Bachelor of Arts in English. The reason was a lead role in Geronimo: An American Legend, shot in Los Angeles. He wrongly expected the movie to be a big success. Harvard still awarded him its Arts Medal in 2013.

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• 3. Good Will Hunting

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  The script for Good Will Hunting began as an English class assignment at Harvard, written in the form of a film treatment. In the early 1990s Damon and Ben Affleck stretched it into a full screenplay about a young mathematics genius. Along the way they folded in advice from director Rob Reiner, screenwriter William Goldman, and writer and director Kevin Smith.

  Damon first asked Affleck to act out scenes with him in front of that class. Later Damon moved into Affleck's Los Angeles apartment, and the two began working on the script in earnest. They wrote mostly through improvisation sessions. The story is set partly in their hometown of Cambridge and draws on their own experiences.

  They sold the screenplay to Castle Rock in 1994. A conflict with that company followed, and the pair convinced Miramax to buy the script instead. The finished film, released in 1997, paid each of them a salary of $600,000. It grossed more than $225 million at the worldwide box office.

  Quentin Curtis of The Daily Telegraph found "real wit and vigour, and some depth" in the writing. Emanuel Levy of Variety wrote that Damon "gives a charismatic performance in a demanding role that's bound to catapult him to stardom." The film earned nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor for Damon. He and Affleck won the Oscar and the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay.

  By his own count, Damon had worked in cinema for 11 years when the film made him famous. He called the change "nearly indescribable", a jump from total obscurity to a New York street where everyone turned to stare. In 2001 the two friends parodied their roles from the film in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

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• 4. Becoming a Leading Man

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  Mystic Pizza in 1988 gave Damon his film debut at the age of 18, with a single line of dialogue. During his Harvard years he took small parts in the TNT original film Rising Son and in School Ties, an ensemble drama set at a prep school.

  Courage Under Fire in 1996 brought his first real notice. He played an opiate-addicted soldier and lost 40 lb in 100 days on a diet and fitness regimen he designed himself. The Washington Post called his performance "impressive".

  The Rainmaker in 1997 gave him the lead in a critically acclaimed drama, and he regained most of that lost weight for the part. The Los Angeles Times described him as "a talented young actor on the brink of stardom."

  Steven Spielberg met Damon on the set of Good Will Hunting and then cast him in the brief title role of Saving Private Ryan, a 1998 World War II film. That same year Damon co-starred with Edward Norton in Rounders. He played a reformed gambler in law school who must return to high-stakes poker to help a friend pay off loan sharks. The film earned little at the box office, yet it is considered one of the best poker movies of all time.

  In The Talented Mr. Ripley, from 1999, Damon played the antihero Tom Ripley and lost 25 lb for the role. The film adapted Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel of the same name and costarred Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cate Blanchett. Damon said he wanted to show Ripley's humanity and honesty despite his crimes. Variety wrote that "Damon outstandingly conveys his character's slide from innocent enthusiasm into cold calculation".

  Dogma, also from 1999, cast him as a fallen angel who discusses pop culture as an intellectual subject with Affleck's character. Reviews were generally positive. Some religious groups, however, deemed the film blasphemous.

  The year 2000 brought two stumbles. All the Pretty Horses and The Legend of Bagger Vance were attempts to lead romantic dramas, and both failed with audiences and critics. Variety said of the first: "He just doesn't quite seem like a young man who's spent his life amidst the dust and dung of a Texas cattle ranch." Peter Rainer of New York magazine thought Damon looked "uncomfortable being the center" of Robert Redford's Bagger Vance.

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• 5. Franchise Years

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  Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, released in 2001, remade the Rat Pack's Ocean's 11 of 1960. Damon played the thief Linus Caldwell, a part first meant for Mark Wahlberg, who declined it to pursue other projects. The film grossed $450 million on a budget of $83 million. Damon returned for two sequels, and the trilogy ran from 2001 to 2007.

  Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity, from 2002, gave Damon the role of Jason Bourne, an amnesiac assassin. Liman had considered several other actors first. Damon insisted on doing many of the stunts himself and trained for three months in stunt work, weapons, boxing, and eskrima. He has said he was jobless for six months beforehand, and that many of his films in that stretch underperformed. He doubted this one's financial prospects, yet it succeeded.

  Roger Ebert praised the film for pulling viewers into its "spycraft" and for "Damon's ability to be focused and sincere". Entertainment Weekly named Damon among "the decade's best mixer of brawn and brains."

  In 2002 Damon also began writing and starring in Gerry, a drama about two friends who go hiking in a desert without bringing food or water. Reviews were generally favorable, but the film failed at the box office.

  The sequels The Bourne Supremacy and Ocean's Twelve both arrived in 2004, and each earned more than $280 million. Nev Pierce of the BBC wrote that Damon is "one hell of an action hero". Damon won an Empire Award for Best Actor for the Bourne sequel. The magazine credited his "astute, underplayed performance" and his refusal of movie star vanity.

  In 2005 Damon played a fictionalized Wilhelm Grimm opposite Heath Ledger in Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, a critically panned commercial failure. Later that year he played an energy analyst in Syriana, a thriller about petroleum politics, alongside George Clooney and Jeffrey Wright. Damon said the film broadened his understanding of the oil industry.

  In 2006 he played a career CIA agent in The Good Shepherd, opposite Robert De Niro. He also played an undercover mobster working for the Massachusetts State Police in Martin Scorsese's The Departed. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times praised his "ability to recede into a film while also being fully present". The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong police thriller Infernal Affairs, won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

  Ocean's Thirteen and The Bourne Ultimatum, the third installments of their series, each earned more than $300 million in 2007. In August of that year Forbes judged Damon the most bankable star among the actors it reviewed. His last three films had averaged $29 at the box office for every dollar he earned. He skipped the fourth Bourne film, then returned as Bourne in 2016, reuniting with director Paul Greengrass.

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• 6. Producer and Performer

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  In 2000 Damon, Affleck, and producers Chris Moore and Sean Bailey founded the production company LivePlanet. It created Project Greenlight, a documentary series that aimed to find and fund worthwhile film projects by novice filmmakers. The show aired on HBO and later Bravo. It was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Reality Program in 2002, 2004, and 2005.

  Damon said he and Affleck felt proud that Project Greenlight helped launch the careers of several directors. He later served as executive producer on a number of projects directed by the show's winners. LivePlanet also made a short-lived mystery-hybrid series, Push, Nevada.

  In March 2010 Damon and Affleck created another company, Pearl Street Films, based at Warner Bros. In March 2018 they announced that every future Pearl Street production deal would adopt the inclusion rider agreement. In 2022 they formed a second company, the independent Artists Equity. Damon also produced the film Manchester by the Sea, released in 2016.

  On television, Damon played Scott Thorson, the longtime partner of the entertainer Liberace, in the drama Behind the Candelabra. Michael Douglas played Liberace, and the film premiered on HBO on the 26th of May 2013. It earned Damon a Primetime Emmy nomination.

  A guest role on 30 Rock, as Liz Lemon's boyfriend, brought him another Emmy nomination in 2011. In 2009 he played himself in the sixth-season finale of Entourage, pressuring Vincent Chase, played by Adrian Grenier, to donate to ONEXONE, Damon's real foundation. He also played himself in an Arthur episode titled "The Making of Arthur". In September 2018 he portrayed jurist Brett Kavanaugh on Saturday Night Live, and in 2019 he hosted the show.

  His voice has traveled widely. He voiced Spirit in the animated film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron in 2002. In August 2009 the English version of Ponyo, in which he lent his voice, reached American theaters. In 2011 he voiced a krill named Bill in Happy Feet Two.

  As a narrator he took on Inside Job, a documentary about how financial deregulation fed the 2008 financial crisis. In 2011 the documentary American Teacher, which he also narrated, opened in New York before screening nationally. In 2014 he appeared as a celebrity correspondent for Years of Living Dangerously.

  In 2012 Damon signed a multiyear deal to voice TD Ameritrade advertisements, replacing Sam Waterston as spokesman. He donated all his fees from the ads to charity. In 2013 a 20-second Nespresso advertisement, directed by Grant Heslov, earned him $3 million. That year he also voiced United Airlines' revived "Fly the Friendly Skies" campaign.

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• 7. Later Films

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  The Informant!, released in 2009, earned Damon a Golden Globe nomination. Entertainment Weekly described him as "a great Everyman actor" who was "in nimble control as he reveals his character's deep crazies."

  Also in 2009, Damon played François Pienaar, captain of the South Africa national rugby union team, in Clint Eastwood's Invictus. Morgan Freeman played Nelson Mandela. The film drew on John Carlin's 2008 book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation. Damon received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and The New Republic credited him with "low-key charm and integrity."

  In 2010 Damon ranked 37th among the highest-grossing actors of all time. That year he reunited with Paul Greengrass for the thriller Green Zone, which flopped commercially and scored 53% on Rotten Tomatoes. His other 2010 projects included Clint Eastwood's Hereafter and the Coen brothers' remake of the 1969 John Wayne Western True Grit.

  The Adjustment Bureau, Contagion, and We Bought a Zoo all followed in 2011. In 2012 he filmed Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant, which Damon co-wrote with John Krasinski. In 2013 he played the car-thief-turned-factory-worker Max DeCosta in the science fiction film Elysium. He also appeared that year in Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem. In 2014 he starred in George Clooney's The Monuments Men and took the minor role of scientist Dr. Mann in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.

  As the astronaut Mark Watney in Ridley Scott's The Martian, Damon carried a film based on Andy Weir's bestselling novel. The 2015 role won him the Golden Globe for Best Actor in the musical or comedy category. It also brought his second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

  Zhang Yimou's The Great Wall, from 2017, was a hit internationally and a disappointment at the domestic box office. Critics received neither the film nor Damon's casting well. Later that year he starred in two satires, Clooney's Suburbicon in October and Alexander Payne's Downsizing in December. In 2019 he played Carroll Shelby in James Mangold's Ford v Ferrari.

  Stillwater, directed by Tom McCarthy, premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Damon played an unemployed oil rig worker from Oklahoma who travels with a French woman to prove his convicted daughter's innocence. IndieWire called his performance "graced with a quiet softness that offsets the sheer volume of the character he's playing".

  The Last Duel, also from 2021, was a historical drama set in medieval France, which Damon starred in and co-wrote with Affleck. He played the knight Jean de Carrouges, who challenges his former friend to a judicial duel after the friend is accused of raping the knight's wife. The film premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival. Reviews were favorable, but it lost money.

  In 2023 Damon played the Nike executive Sonny Vaccaro in Air, a drama about the launch of Air Jordan, which Affleck directed and co-starred in. The role earned Damon a Golden Globe nomination. He then reunited with Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer, playing Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. The film was a critical and commercial success and became his highest-grossing movie. Films in which Damon has appeared have collectively earned over $3.88 billion at the North American box office.

  In 2024 Damon starred in and produced The Instigators, made with Casey Affleck for Apple TV+. His next collaboration with Nolan is The Odyssey, in which he plays Odysseus. Damon called the shoot "the pinnacle of my entire career, I loved every minute of it."

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• 8. Life Off Screen

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  Darfur is one of the atrocities that the Not On Our Watch Project was created to confront. Damon co-founded the organization with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, David Pressman, and Jerry Weintraub. Its aim is to focus global attention and resources on stopping and preventing mass atrocities.

  Damon also supports the One Campaign, which fights AIDS and poverty in the developing world, and he has appeared in its print and television advertising. He is an ambassador for ONEXONE, a nonprofit that supports children in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. He is a spokesperson for Feeding America and a member of its Entertainment Council. He once sat on the board of Tonic Mailstopper, formerly GreenDimes, a company that tried to stop junk mail from reaching American homes.

  The H2O Africa Foundation, which Damon founded as the charitable arm of the Running the Sahara expedition, merged with WaterPartners in 2009 to create Water.org. Its mission is bringing safe, clean, cost-effective drinking water and sanitation to developing countries. In 2011 the PepsiCo Foundation gave it an $8 million grant to scale up WaterCredit, which offers microloans to families in India. Damon promoted those efforts alongside Aquafina and Ethos Water, owned by PepsiCo and Starbucks.

  Since 2015 he has promoted Anheuser-Busch InBev's Stella Artois beer as a Water.org partner. The campaign included limited-edition "blue chalice" glasses and a commercial during the 2018 Super Bowl. On the 30th of July 2025 Damon competed alongside Ken Jennings on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. They won $1 million for Water.org. The win made the pair the third celebrity contestants, and the sixteenth contestants overall, to take the top prize.

  In October 2021 Damon announced a partnership with the cryptocurrency platform Crypto.com, which was to donate $1 million to Water.org. He said he would give 100% of his fee for the commercials to the charity too, adding, "So, it's millions of dollars coming in to us." The ad reached cinemas late in 2021 and television in January 2022, mainly during sports programming such as NFL games.

  Broad broadcast set off sharp criticism, as did the accompanying making-of featurette. Nathan Place of The Independent reported that Twitter was cringing at an ad that set cryptocurrency trading beside explorers and astronauts. Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer wrote, "There isn't enough yuck in the world to describe Matt Damon advertising a Ponzi scheme and comparing it to the moon landings."

  In December 2006, on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Damon discussed the Iraq War and voiced concern about which socioeconomic classes are asked to do the fighting. In a January 2003 interview with the Sunday Herald, he said of guns, "I actually hate guns. They freak me out." He supports the Democratic Party. In 2012 he joined Affleck and John Krasinski in hosting a fundraiser for the Senate nominee Elizabeth Warren, and in 2016 he endorsed Hillary Clinton.

  In October 2017 the former New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman said that Damon and Russell Crowe had phoned her to vouch for Fabrizio Lombardo, head of Miramax Italy. She suspected Lombardo of facilitating Harvey Weinstein's misconduct in Europe. Damon clarified that the calls were solely to reassure her of Lombardo's professional qualifications, and Waxman endorsed his statement on Twitter hours later.

  In December 2017 Damon argued for a "spectrum of behavior" when judging cases of sexual misconduct. Prominent members of the Me Too movement and the public called the comment tone-deaf. On the 17th of January 2018 he apologized on The Today Show, saying he "should get in the back seat and close my mouth for a while".

  In August 2021 Damon told The Sunday Times that he had stopped using a slur for gay men only months earlier. His daughter had left the table over his use of the word and then written "a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous". He said he was proud of her passion for social justice.

  Jimmy Kimmel ended each episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! by apologizing for not having time to interview Damon. The running gag culminated in a planned skit on the 12th of September 2006, when Damon stormed off after his interview was cut short. On the 24th of January 2013 Damon took over Kimmel's show and recalled the long-standing feud.

  Damon met his wife, Luciana Bozán, in April 2003 while filming Stuck on You in Miami. They became engaged in September 2005 and married in a private civil ceremony at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau on the 9th of December 2005. They have three daughters, born in 2006, 2008, and 2010, and he considers Bozán's daughter from a previous marriage his own. Since 2012 the family has lived in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. In 2018 Damon bought a luxury penthouse in Brooklyn Heights for $16.5 million.

  A Boston Red Sox fan, Damon narrated the commemorative DVD after the team won the 2007 World Series. He has played in several World Series of Poker events, including the 2010 main event. Poker professional Doyle Brunson eliminated him from the 1998 tournament.

  On the 25th of July 2007 Damon became the 2,343rd person to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He reacted by saying, "A few times in my life, I've had these experiences that are just kind of too big to process and this looks like it's going to be one of those times."

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