Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023).
Much of the praise for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer has highlighted the strength of its ensemble cast. Cillian Murphy has garnered considerable acclaim for his cold and haunted performance as the eponymous father of the atomic bomb, and so has Robert Downey Jr. as his vindictive foil, Admiral Lewis Strauss. Less has been said about Matt Damon’s supporting portrayal of one of the most pivotal figures in the J. Robert Oppenheimer story: Major General Leslie Groves, the American military man who oversaw the Manhattan Project, and hired Oppenheimer. Gruff, difficult to please, exacting in his military objectives, and occasionally comic, Damon plays him with the understated, reliably solid craft that’s defined his career. And in what has proven to be characteristic of Damon’s screen presence, he plays Groves as less conservative than he first appears: he’s a character who’s willing to gently undercut received wisdom about hiring a former suspected communist, a “womanizer,” and someone otherwise considered unfit for the job of directing the Manhattan Project. He defends the increasingly beleaguered Oppenheimer with a genuine undercurrent of affection, though for the most part, this is kept well-hidden beneath his tough exterior.
Take a glance at Damon’s recent screen credits and you’ll find a plethora of hyper-focused masculine types who are equally steely about achieving their end-goals, be that Groves putting together a civilian-scientist project of enormous magnitude, Carroll Shelby racing the Italians to the finish in Ford v Ferrari (2019), or Sonny Vaccaro’s desperate Nike exec in AIR (2023). With roles like this, Damon forms a kind of one-man mosaic of Dad Cinema: that is to say, films in which middle-aged or ordinary, family-man types pursue traditionally masculine excellence in an unshowy way, be it in the boardroom, the military, or the racetrack. If Damon has aged into a stolid, rounder-faced, patrician presence these days, though, his early-career roles have always hinted at this trajectory.
Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997).
Go back to 1997, and as far as images of golden-boy, wunderkind white male dominance go, you’d be hard put to find a better example than Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, aged 25 and 27 respectively, jointly holding up their Good Will Hunting Oscar onstage. The film—a likable drama with some poignant monologuing from its earnest Boston boy leads, and a heavy hitter in the form of Robin Williams—would prove to be an interesting model for Damon’s future persona. The film revolves around male ambition and thwarted potential: so many of Damon’s films dwell in the male fantasy space that puts a bandage on those psychic wounds, raising his apparent ordinariness to something extraordinary.
Raised in a comfortable middle-class home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Damon’s parents—a stockbroker and a university professor—divorced when he was a toddler. But Damon otherwise had a solid upbringing, attending Harvard for a degree in English that he would later abandon for an acting career. His first appearance, in Mystic Pizza (1988), sees him say just one line, but after he was cast in the TV movie Rising Son (1990), he dropped out of college and moved to LA, with mixed success landing roles throughout the decade. When Damon and his roommate—his childhood friend and fellow aspiring actor Ben Affleck—missed out on Edward Norton’s role in Primal Fear (1996), they decided to take matters into their own hands: they would write their own screenplay.
By 1997, much of Damon’s biography was absorbed into Good Will Hunting, directed by Gus Van Sant. Damon inverts the story of his real life, in a sense, by making himself a blue-collar boy done good, an underachieving genius rather than a striver who found university antithetical to his ambition. His defiance—arrogance, even—toward the film’s sniffy, academic powers-that-be feels merited because they’re such snobs, unable to see past his social class. Damon embodies the role with a self-assured tilt to his chin but a telling physical restlessness; he’s always moving, reflecting his interior state. What better way to gently absolve oneself of real-life ambition, as yet unfulfilled, than to play someone like Will Hunting?
In this role, Damon has a curiously attenuated quality that has followed him throughout his career. He has know-it-all cheekiness and charisma, but he can flatten himself into the background (he’s a janitor, after all). He’s just distinctive enough to draw the eye, with a glimmer of insubordination beneath the all-American boy niceness. It’s what makes him a great spy in the form of Jason Bourne: unlike the attention-grabbing, nattily-dressed James Bond, he actually can fly under the radar.
Damon himself has acknowledged it. In a recent podcast interview, he spoke about the way his real life has almost entirely swerved from the tabloid attention that his friend and creative partner Ben Affleck has received. As Damon pointed out: “I lived down the street from Ben and his first wife for years, and there were always cars parked outside his house, never outside mine. I rode my mountain bike around, no one tried to take my picture.” Affleck responded, “The thing I envy most about Matt is the extent to which he's been able to avoid and [has] been spared that kind of thing.” It’s a worthwhile comparison: Affleck has similar everyman qualities to Damon’s, but is far more believable as a womanizer or even a wife-killer because of his sculpted smugness; he has a certain self-regard that Damon either lacks or, at least, is better at subsuming. That’s as true of his early roles as his later ones: whether he’s an oily social climber in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) or a baseball-capped roughneck in Stillwater (2021), he has an ordinariness that Affleck is a bit too square-jawed and self-aware to possess.
The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999).
Even before he had aged—that is to say, when he was younger and blonder—he suited roles that required a certain surface placidity. In Anthony Minghella’s excellent The Talented Mr. Ripley, Damon was the anti-Alain Delon (who took on the role in Plein Soleil [1960], René Clément’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel). Damon plays the part not as the devilish playboy but as the terribly ordinary—even tedious—young man, a try-hard and an interloper, a guy who always feels like he’s elbowing in on the party. You could say he is good-looking; he is, but he’s prep-school with it, too clean-cut to be sexy. The film is among Damon’s best because it uses his very averageness against him, making his hesitant smile seem sly, a dangerous put-on rather than mild-mannered charm.
Yet Ripley is a standout because of its relative rarity: Damon is generally not one to go for being unlikeable or subversive, unless you count his turn as a crooked cop heel in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006), playing more obnoxiously against his likability than usual. He tends to play more “against type” in films by big-name directors like Steven Soderbergh or the Coen brothers. In Behind the Candelabra (2013), Damon plays what might be his least predictably Damon part: Scott Thorson, a young showbiz animal trainer who becomes the lover of Michael Douglas’s Liberace. Damon’s portrayal of closeted homosexuality and innocence wrecked by drugs and disillusion is one of his finest; playing Thorson from ages 17 to 28, Damon works through a series of physical transformations via Thorson’s plastic surgeries, as well as weird emotional dramas of codependency with Liberace. Damon’s body language and manner are passive, and it’s strange to see someone so typically and doggedly hetero swathe himself in the sheen of the male love object, all twirling fingers and bronzed chest. His quiet, wounded gaze—particularly in scenes where Liberace turns on him with abrupt viciousness—is all the more fascinating and tender since it comes from such an unexpected source.
Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, 2013).
The other strong tendency of Damon’s is to lean into his comic side: be it appearances on 30 Rock or riffing on his own persona in Entourage, he’s a man who loves a cameo. At various points, he cropped up in an alternate Marvel universe as Thor’s mischief-making brother Loki in Thor: Ragnarok (2017), as a piercing-studded rock star in EuroTrip (2004), and, maybe my personal favorite, as an entitled jerk in a fake sequel to Good Will Hunting in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001). But his cameos can carry some weight: he turns up and steals the conclusion of Steven Soderbergh’s underrated gangster film No Sudden Move (2021), as a mastermind criminal who monologues from a progressive point-of-view about inequality and greed. This seems to speak more to a desire to support Soderbergh than to any egotism on Damon’s part; “I try to be a part of every movie Steven does,” Damon has said. Damon delights in surprising the audience, but as with No Sudden Move, his sleek, fleeting appearance rarely upsets the momentum of the film itself, something of a rubber-stamp of approval for the project.
Lately, Damon has devoted more and more energy to championing creatively ambitious projects. He and Affleck recently founded the production company Artists Equity: their first film was the Affleck-directed AIR, but other projects they’ve funded include Oppenheimer costar Cillian Murphy’s upcoming Irish-set production, Small Things Like These. There is an overarching logic here beyond the ho-hum string of historical projects or biopics: this is a company dedicated to prioritizing creative talent’s skills and passions.
Between the Marvel cameos, this commitment is also evident in Damon’s choice of characters. In the past 15 years, he’s been drawn to more overtly eccentric protagonists. In Soderbergh’s dark comedy The Informant! (2009), he plays a dumpy whistleblower on corporate malfeasance who has a greasy, devious nature. Yet, this demeanor feels utterly justified; he may not be likable, but he is a master of high-stakes self-delusion with a ring of truth. He is far more likable as the lead of Alexander Payne’s Downsizing (2017). He plays a mild-mannered Midwestern therapist—an avatar of ordinariness—who decides to take part in an experimental social project, agreeing to be shrunk down to Thumbelina-size to afford a much fancier life. Even Damon’s most Capra-esque, “aw, shucks!” roles are carefully chosen within the context of mordant social critique (here, with a solid dose of squelchy body horror).
The Last Duel (Ridley Scott, 2021).
Perhaps the most perfect recent example of Damon’s calibration of ordinariness and glinting self-awareness is his cleverly multivalent part in Ridley Scott’s financially underperforming but brilliant The Last Duel (2021), which Damon and Affleck also cowrote, along with Nicole Holofcener. On paper, it’s all pretty straightforward: Jean de Carrouges is an ambitious and hardworking squire who moves up toward knighthood, with a respectable position, land ownership, and a sterling military pedigree. But as a splintered POV retraces the film’s events—and the plot’s pivotal rape of his wife Marguerite (Jodie Comer) —we begin to see him less as a hero and more as an ignorant boor, someone protecting his reputation and his “property” rather than with any remote sense of moral duty or empathy for her plight.
If Damon’s prior roles build a collective foundation for our understanding of the next, then his ignorant Jean de Carrouges may be one of his most subtly self-aware performances to date. Compared to vile rapist Jacques le Gris (Adam Driver), he is the lesser of two evils—not aggressively violent, theoretically upholding virtuous principles—and yet he is an equally reprehensible character, vanilla in the banality of his misogyny and self-importance. Damon’s ordinariness is twisted here, straightforward in its display of workaday macho ugliness: a perfect bedfellow for his type.
Matt Damon is not an actor we expect to aggressively innovate like Adam Driver, to bristle with formidable solemnity like Denzel Washington, to ooze with unctuous charm like Ben Affleck. You can almost define him by what he lacks, or at least seems to avoid. This everyman aura is deceiving, giving him the ability to surprise, even fascinate. As seen in Oppenheimer’s General Groves, his very embodiment of that straight-down-the-middle ordinariness holds room for untold ambition and even flat-out shrewdness. As with his Ripley, his Will Hunting, his General Groves, and his Jason Bourne, the canny glimmer in Damon’s eyes may not be subversive, as such. But don’t let that apple pie look fool you: it’s exactly what helps him get his foot in the door.