Save this story Save Story Save this story I n the desert , as the song goes, you can remember your name. So it’s fitting that Matt Damon has come here—to a sweltering stretch of inland California near Lancaster—to reflect on his 30-odd-year career as one of the most familiar and bankable faces in Hollywood, and specifically on a year that will go down as one of that career’s most challenging and rewarding passages.
Damon set 2026 off with The Rip, a throwback pulp thriller that reteamed him with his lifetime BFF Ben Affleck. He then went on to dominate the summer to a degree most actors crossing the other side of 55 wouldn’t dream of, with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey —a noisy, thrilling, engrossing feat of big-budget moviemaking that wouldn’t have worked without an Odysseus compelling enough to command audiences to take the 20-year journey with him. The role demanded everything in Damon’s toolbox, and then some, but the result was a cultural and commercial run that only Spider-Man himself could top.
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This is rare air, and Damon knows it. Lightning struck once for him, with Good Will Hunting in 1997—he never thought he’d see that happen again, much less 29 years later. If exhaustion is the price of beating those odds, then so be it. Still readjusting to life on dry land, Damon sat down to unpack the most unlikely filmmaking experience of his career—and begin working out where he might want to go next.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
GQ : I want to start at the beginning of your year. I don’t know if you saw this, but Quentin Tarantino wrote about The Rip for Sight and Sound. In that piece, he said—and he included himself in this too—that audiences are so familiar with you that they might take your skills for granted, but that you’re actually aging into an even more dynamic performer. Matt Damon : That is amazing coming from him. Yes, I did hear about it.
Yeah, I think if you talk to any actor my age, any of the usual suspects, they’d probably say the same thing. I think the more you do it, if you’re working with really good people, you’re always improving, you’re getting better. And then you’re living more life and you have your family dynamics, all of your primary relationships kind of fill up your reservoir. I’ve talked to other actors my age about it, Ben included—I think there’s a tendency to push when you’re younger, a little bit, to try to work yourself up, and the older you get, the more available a lot of this stuff is. These very, very, very big emotions are kind of just sitting [near the surface]. And so you can really relax into the work, and it can be very full without being forced.
I think so, yeah. I mean, I’ve never been a part of a movie like The Odyssey that was…. Well, I guess Oppenheimer, to an extent, was somewhat of a phenomenon as well.
My workload was a lot heavier on this one, and everybody’s was, and that was kind of the joy of it. We knew we were the first ones to ever try to do a full film in IMAX [70 mm], and that comes with a whole host of challenges for every single department. We were all, I think, very patient with each other because we knew what was being asked of the other people. So in terms of the acting department—the IMAX load is two and a half minutes or three minutes. And so these big, heavy emotional scenes—you couldn’t play them all the way through. You’d have to cut them up. And the crew was just awesome, very patient with us. It felt like we were explorers, in a way. We got to be the first ones to do it, and that really bonded us.
Shirt by Dolce & Gabbana. Sunglasses by Jacques Marie Mage. At any point in your past, did you see this coming? I never would have expected it. And also, to play a role that’s so physical and, at my age, to even have a role that’s available on a scale like this. I’d always wanted to make a David Lean movie. To have it come at this point in my life, I felt incredibly lucky, not only to be able to do it, but also to be able to contextualize it. I don’t think I would’ve appreciated it as much 20 years ago.
No, I just don’t think I would’ve been able to understand and to hold as much gratitude as I am and as I did throughout the process. It’s all about how you look at things. And in retrospect, yeah, we were probably cold and wet. There was a lot of physical discomfort that was temporary. But because I felt so grateful to be there, I was just so excited. I was just so joyful the whole time that I didn’t really notice any of that.
[ Laughs ] There are no sure things, man. I think that’s where you get into trouble, being like, Well, this is a surefire hit. I’ve heard that before.
I felt it when I saw it. There is that thing that can happen where you make a movie, and you feel like it’s really good, and it just doesn’t connect, and there’s just nothing you can do about that. But as the audience reactions started to come in and the critical reactions were great as well, it was like, Okay ….
Chris [Nolan], the most nervous he is in the entire process, from the very beginning to the very end, is the eve of the film coming out. He’s genuinely nervous. He talks openly about it, because that is the moment that you put it out into the world and you have to live with the reaction. Ultimately, the audience decides. Once it opened and the responses were what they were, I think I felt like, We’re going to be okay. It was a big bet in the sense that it was a big budget. I’m not used to playing in that arena. The numbers that movies have to get to just to break even at that level are just so beyond the movies that I’m known for.
I feel like you’ve done a few. A few of them. But The Martian, which I think is the biggest movie that I’ve ever headlined—I think The Odyssey made three times what that made. And that was a real hit for me. But there’s this other league of these kinds of movies that are in the billions that I’ve just never….
Well, the thing about a role like that is every single day I was paired with an unbelievable scene partner. One day I’d be working with Annie [Hathaway], and then the next day I’d be working with Himesh [Patel]. It’s following this character through all these different stages of his life and people who are close to him. So every day was a different, exciting little challenge, a little puzzle to figure out. I’ve always said that when you’re working with a great actor, they’re so good that they’re good enough for both of you. And it’s almost like this wave comes and you just stand up on your board and ride it. Then you have Samantha Morton, who literally just picks you up and shoulder-carries you.
It’s very hard to come in and do really intense things in a very short time frame. [Morton’s scenes]—that was under a week of shooting. Each day being incredibly intense. And that was what was so incredible about these actors who would come in. They’re under a lot of pressure. Nobody says that, but we all know the deal. These are critical scenes, and everybody just came in and killed it. It just got more and more exciting as we were going.
I agree. She’s incredible. She’s always been incredible. We had a near-miss working together in 2003—and I got to know her then—in a movie with Heath Ledger. I just think the world of her as an actress, and I was excited when we did the scene. I was like, This one’s going to really work. And I hope—it doesn’t always happen right away, but hopefully it’s lodged her back in the minds of people who are making those decisions, because she’s just extraordinary.
That’s the emotional spine of the movie. A lot of that monologue that I have at the end is in voiceover, but I wrote it all out and I had it on my phone and I would just carry it with me off set. I would just revisit it and run through it a few times, and I was doing that for months and months. Firstly, I thought it was just so beautifully written, but also because I knew that scene had to land. If that lands, then the movie works.
And that also means setting them up as a young couple before he leaves. There’s a lot of engineering that goes into getting to a scene like that and then you have to execute it. I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about that one.
Well, at that point, the audience has been on the journey with you, and it’s been a hell of a journey, so you don’t have to tell them that. We were tired. That scene I shot with Samantha, oddly, we had come from Iceland, but we were shooting nights, and we came to Scotland, and I had it happen two or three times on this movie where I just didn’t sleep. I was tired and I went to bed, and I’m sure everyone’s had that feeling where you’ve got to get up the next day and you have something that you have to do and you can’t fall asleep and you’re kicking the blanket around and you’re staring at the ceiling. By the time I got to work to do the scene with Sam, I hadn’t slept in 24 hours, and by the end of the day it was 36 or whatever. I remember thinking the great thing about this character is he probably didn’t sleep last night. Don’t worry about it. So the weariness was very real for a lot of the movie.
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It’s all in there because it’s what I’m actually feeling. As I was saying before, it’s very easy to relax into what’s real and available and to have access to it.
This was the biggest one that we’ve ever done, and we’ve always had a two-week rule. I think the first stretch [on The Odyssey ], I was away for three and a half weeks. The first half of the movie was the hardest because the kids were still in school. And then once the summer hit, they could come to set and we could be together. But that first stretch—luckily they’re huge Chris Nolan fans and they knew that it was this incredible role, so they were really supportive, and it was a sacrifice for them, and they were awesome about it.
He’s turned down a lot of work. And in fact, he really wanted to take on the CEO role at [Damon and Affleck’s production company] Artists Equity because it would keep him home. So when he directs—for instance, Animals, that was all shot in LA. He said to me when we started the company—he’s got joint custody, which means he gets to be with the kids half the time. And he said, “If I go to Estonia and do a movie, it’s not like I get that time back.” So that for him means he’s got to stay in LA.
I felt that way when I did Air with Ben. It was such a joyful experience, and we had so much fun, and we really loved the movie we made. We had this discussion about how I don’t want to do [a project] unless it’s joyful and unless it’s really right for my life. So much of being a young actor is you’re afraid it’s going to go away. You’re very much still in touch with that feeling of being unemployed. And so when Ben and I got famous, we both really worked. Buried ourselves in work. Partly because people are suddenly offering you things and you can’t imagine turning anything down, right? It just seems counter to everything you’ve been trying so hard to do for your entire life.
The first time was before The Bourne Identity came out. I had done The Legend of Bagger Vance with Will [Smith] and Charlize [Theron], and that movie didn’t do well. And Will was, as he is now, the biggest star. And so it’s like, it’s not Will’s fault. [ Laughs ] And then I did All the Pretty Horses with Billy Bob [Thornton], and that was a whole fraught experience. There were different ideas between the studio and between Billy Bob about what the movie should be, and so it ended up getting cut in a way that wasn’t to Billy’s liking and it didn’t do well. And so I had had these misses. And so there was this stretch where the phone just didn’t ring. The silence was…. It was a real rose-colored lenses coming off.
Well, the other thing was that The Bourne Identity was delayed something like a year. And so the word was, That’s going to be a stinker. But in that time, I went right from [filming] Bourne to Ocean’s Eleven. Then there was this whole period of time where nobody was calling, except for Steven Soderbergh, who called and offered me the movie The Informant! And I was so confused. I asked him, “Are you asking me to write it?” Because I couldn’t imagine he was asking me to be in it, because nobody else was calling. He goes, “What? No, Scott Burns is writing it. I want you to be the lead.” And I’ve never forgotten that. He just paid no attention to what everyone else was saying. But anyway, leaving that aside, nobody else was calling. And then The Bourne Identity came out, and it was a big hit.
It’s not personal. It’s business. And people can’t really go out of their way to help you. It’s really a pretty cold calculus that determines whether or not you’re on the list or off the list. And you never know who’s on the list. And the list can be different for different studios, who they’ll greenlight a movie with.
Jacket by Huntsman Savile Row. Vest by Gieves & Hawkes. Tank top by Zimmerli. Pants by Scabal. Pocket square by Brioni. Shoes by Carmina. Necklace (throughout) by Cartier. That’s not, like, an urban legend, “the list”? No, no. There’s very, very frank conversations between agents and studio people going like, “I can’t greenlight the movie with X, but I can with Y.” And that list is always changing, and I know that sometimes I’m on it and sometimes I’m not. I just have to remember it’s not personal, but you can feel it if you’re on the list or not.
Yeah. And [the] quality of projects [you’re offered]. I’m sure I’ve worked my way off that list a number of times. I’ve had some movies that didn’t work, and then you got to pay attention. I remember 2012 to 2014-ish, maybe, Patrick [Whitesell], my agent for 35 years, said I was taking a lot of supporting roles—because again, I’m not strategizing at all. I’m just like, Oh, True Grit. I want to work with the Coen brothers. Great.
Yup, George [Clooney directing], great. So there was this string of movies like that. Patrick called me and he said, “You’ll become a supporting actor. We got to think about this next one.” And then what happened to come along was The Martian. But that’s about as much strategizing as we’ve ever done.
Interstellar was in there too. I’m so happy that I’m in that movie. I love the role, even though it’s a tiny part. When Chris offered me [the role], we hadn’t worked together, and [when] he offered me the part in Interstellar, he said, “Do you know that saying ‘There are no small parts, there are only small actors’ ? This is a small part.” But I think he undersold it, because it’s a really kind of pivotal role, and I had a ball doing it.
Yeah, I think I was on a Bourne movie or about to go do Green Zone with Paul Greengrass. That and Milk. I was supposed to play the Dan White part. And I was really excited about it. I’d spoken to Sean [Penn], and I’d started the research. I’d been watching the documentaries about him. Then Sean’s schedule changed and the movie had to push three months, which meant that it was going to conflict with the movie I was going to do with Paul. So I had to bow out, and I just loved that script so much. And I love Gus [Van Sant], obviously. And so that was a bummer. But having said that, they got Josh Brolin, and Josh is absolutely brilliant in the movie. That helped a lot, I think, with this feeling that I have, that I do believe that the right actor gets the part.
I never like to say that, because I don’t want to live with the regret, but I can tell you that I passed on Ted, and I’ve never had this experience where I laughed so hard reading a script. I literally took it to dinner and was reading parts of it out to my friends at dinner. And then I just got too clever by half. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was like, Well, maybe the teddy bear’s actually the best part.…
So I overthought it and I talked myself out of it. And because it shot in Boston, it would’ve been a chance for me to be home—my father’s passed away now, and I look back and I go, Man, that would’ve been six months back [home].
But, again, the right actor got the part. Mark [Wahlberg’s] great, and the movie’s great, and I wouldn’t have made it any better.
They’re really hard to do. And I don’t read a lot [of them]. I don’t think people think of me for comedies a lot. But I love them, and I love watching them, and I love doing them if I can get my hands on one. But they’re few and far between. I think because they don’t travel well. They’re harder to get made because you really have to get all your money back in America. Comedy is so cultural. So the margin for error, I think, is smaller, which is what’s so great when you see a great one.
Anthony [Minghella], I think, was the first, with Talented Mr. Ripley. And he talked openly about it. A lot of these directors do. They want to use whatever it is that you have to offer in a new way and in a fun way and in an unexpected way. Some of those roles are the best roles that I’ve ever had a chance to play. Really interesting, complex people, and I love that.
Jacket by Maison Margiela. Pants by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Scarf (throughout) by Charvet. Ring, his own. The Departed turned 20 this year, so I have to ask you if you remember anything about that time specifically. I shot a scene in a movie theater with [Jack Nicholson], and Jack was working with an earwig. It was just the three of us before the crew came in, and we were just rehearsing. Marty [Scorsese] goes, “Let’s run this and see how we think it’s going to go.” And Jack took the earpiece out and we rehearsed the scene a few times and Jack was letter-perfect with his dialogue. And so Marty went to get the crew, and as people were coming in I said, “Hey, man, what’s the deal with the earwig? You obviously know all your lines—you’re writing stuff.” And it was really interesting because, he goes, “The older you get, the harder it is to remember your lines.” And that feeling of going up on a line, that panic, that surge of adrenaline that you get—he goes, “It just makes me so uncomfortable.” It’s a fail-safe. And if he knows [the earpiece is] there, his body stays in that relaxed state. People might think it was laziness. It was the opposite. He was a grinder. He worked really, really hard. It was more about just protecting himself.
No, no, no, no, no. I think everybody was really focused on Marty. And I remember I was shooting second unit for The Bourne Ultimatum during that Oscars, so I didn’t go. I was living in Miami at the time, and I had an infant. [My wife] Lucy and I were laying in bed watching it and so nervous for Marty. And then when he won, I was jumping up and down in the bedroom and I remember being really excited. And then the next category was best picture, and The Departed won. And I realized in that moment I hadn’t even considered that that could happen. And I turned to Lucy and I was like, “Shit, we should be there!” And then the next few weeks, I got all these calls from all the cast and the studio, like, “Hey, where were you, man?” I totally blew it. And then the next time that that happened was on Oppenheimer, and we had this whole scary thing happen where my wife had a brain aneurysm.
She’s totally fine, thank God, but [she] had this brain surgery the week before the Oscars. But it was the first night she felt good enough to get up and had her energy back. And she surprised me and got a dress and we went out to the after-party, because she remembered that the last time it happened, I didn’t do it. And she was like, “This time we’re going out.” And it was pretty fucking heroic of her to do that and really meaningful.
It’s not something you can control. You got to just do the work, and that’s got to be the reward. Because it’s like, then if you don’t win, do you feel bad about something that was really positive? Don’t turn this into something bad. It’s a tricky one. I always think about old movies when I look at them and it says, “So-and-so won an Oscar, so-and-so didn’t.” You’re judging it in a totally different way. It’s not attached to that anymore. I think the real way they should do them, really, is 20 or 25 years later. You’ll have a really good idea of which movies really endured and really still matter to you. There can be hype in the moment, or it can be a zeitgeist thing, but it doesn’t hold up. The goal for me is to make as many of those movies that are around 20 years later. That’s a cool thing. People come up [to me] about Good Will Hunting and I realize they weren’t born when the movie came out. It’s just very cool for Ben and me to have a new generation of people actually see it.
I don’t know what that means. I live in Brooklyn. [ Laughs ] If the trail is in that area, yeah. I don’t know what that entails. I will say, the technical side of this movie—I think of someone like Willie Burton, our sound guy, who’s in his 80s and he is a legend in the business.
And I did not loop a line in this movie, which is incredible. And I did not loop a line in Oppenheimer, which is incredible. Willie and Doug [Shamburger], his boom operator, are so good. Every scene on the ship, Willie is down below in the hold mixing in storms. The fact that he salvages all of that dialogue is nothing short of amazing. The technical achievement of our heads of department and their teams were really special. And I just hope that people realize that, realize what it took to do what they did, because from a technical standpoint, I hope they all get their flowers.
I didn’t think I was going to work. And then the Daniels called me and they had this project that was so out there, and it was such a Daniels movie and it’s so different from anything I’ve ever been able to do that I couldn’t pass it up. They’re really good people, and this movie’s like a cosmic love bomb for the world. So it felt like the right place to put my energy, but we’re almost done shooting it, and yeah, I’m going to take a long time off.
Tailcoat and pants by Scabal. Shirt by Charvet. Shoes by Carmina. Pocket square by Anderson & Sheppard. Shirt studs by Verdura. We talked about Jack earlier. Do you have any GOATs that you want to model your late-stage career on? I haven’t thought about it. There are a lot of great performances. Paul Newman had some great ones at the end. We have the studio now with Artists Equity, and I feel like we’re just going to do stuff we really want to do, because it’s a very time-consuming job, and if you’re not 100 percent in, it’s just not worth doing. You have to really let it take over your life. I think that was one of the joys of The Odyssey —it dominated our lives.
There was a funny thing that happened on The Odyssey. We were in Scotland. I was with my kids. They’d just come over and gotten out of school, and we were eating dinner in this tiny hotel in this tiny town. And so there was one little dining room, which had 10 little tables in it, and the crew had watched dailies and so they were shuffling in, and I was already eating with my kids—I had jeans and a flannel shirt and a baseball hat on. And Chris came in and he walked by the table and I said, “Hey, Chris.” And he turned and he goes, “Oh, hey, Matt. I didn’t recognize you with the beard.” Chris doesn’t say stupid things—it was definitely the stupidest thing he’s ever said, because we’d been next to each other for six months.
He had just walked out of dailies watching close-ups of me, I’m sure with this giant beard. And I looked at him and he immediately realized what he’d said and he just looked at his shoes and then he looked up, like, Can we just agree that this never happened? And he shuffled off, and my kids go, “Dad, does Chris Nolan not know who you are?” I was like, “No, guys, he’s just exhausted.” He was that tired. He hadn’t seen me out of wardrobe in a while, you know what I mean? We were so tired by the end of that movie.
Well, he should write us a movie. We would be very happy if he did that.
Who knows? I have no right to expect it, let’s put it that way. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but I have such gratitude for the fact that this came along my path at this point. I have no right to expect anything like that to happen again. But in the meantime, I just want to make good stuff and definitely keep working with Ben, because we’re at that point in our life where we’re like, “Fuck it, why not?” This was our dream as kids, as boys. We got to honor those boys and keep working together if we can. ✦
PRODUCTION CREDITS: Photography by Richard Burbridge Styling by George Cortina Hair by Johnnie Sapong using Leonor Greyl Skin by Mark Carrasquillo Tailoring by Susanna Badalyan Sets by Heath Mattioli for Frank Reps Production by Kendal Steensen and Felix Cadieu for NEIGHBORS
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2026 issue of GQ with the title “Matt Damon Never Thought 56 Would Be So Epic.”
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