Matt Damon is essentially a bland dish that requires the right spice truly to zing, which means he is often at his best when playing beastly. His flagrantly nasty turn as one of the antisemitic bullies in School Ties offers an early indication that Damon realised this, too.
Damon lost about 25kg for a handful of scenes as the traumatised, heroin-addicted young Gulf war veteran in Courage Under Fire. The sudden weight loss left him reeling: “I was looking for something to set me apart: ‘Look what I’ll do, I’ll kill myself!’” It paid off. “Directors took note of it.”
In Syriana, Damon’s storyline has a crisp moral complexity. He plays Bryan Woodman, an energy analyst whose oldest son dies accidentally during a party at the home of a Middle Eastern emir. Woodman is later mollified with a lucrative contract from the emir’s family. “How much for my other kid?” he asks caustically – before accepting the offer.
Contagion sees Damon reunited with Gwyneth Paltrow from The Talented Mr Ripley, though not for long. She plays his wife, who brings back from her Hong Kong business trip a deadly virus. She expires messily soon after, as does their son, leaving Damon to fend for himself and their teenage daughter amid the ensuing pandemic. Steven Soderbergh’s 1970s-style all-star disaster movie was a hit on release, then found its second wind during Covid.
Team America: World Police is a work of genius, but it is wide of the mark in presenting Damon as a humourless lobotomised hunk. His comic sparkle is crucial to the charm of the Farrelly brothers’ Stuck on You, in which he and Greg Kinnear play conjoined twins who work harmoniously together as ice-hockey goalkeepers and short-order cooks.
Gruffness and warmth combine beautifully in Damon’s portrayal of Gen Leslie Groves in Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, who hires J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) to beat the Nazis in building an atomic weapon. Informed that the chances of destroying the world are near-zero, and asked what more he wants, he shoots back: “Zero would be nice.”
