Matt Damon is Born Again

I know you may be surprised to learn this news, but Matt Damon is born again. Yes, I have it on good authority that Matt is born again.

Oh, wait a minute. That was a misspelling!

What I meant to write was Matt Damon is Bourne again!

“E! News” reported recently that Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass, the director of his first Bourne film, will make another film in the Jason Bourne series based on the exciting character created by author, Robert Ludlum.

That’s the truth. Our favorite actor, boyish-looking Matt Damon, at the age of 45 (who knew?) will once again play our favorite rogue U.S. spy and amnesiac killing machine, Jason Bourne, in a sequel to his three successful Bourne films.

The fourth episode is projected to be in theaters in 2016.

If you like suspenseful, action movies with intricate plots and excellent actors, be sure you see the first three Bourne films:

“The Bourne Identity,”

“The Bourne Supremacy,”

“The Bourne Ultimatum” – in that order.

You will not be disappointed. Trust me!

I intended to interview Matt Damon via my personal supernatural communication technology. But I ran out of aluminum foil for the headpiece. So I had to substitute a piece of foil already used to cook steak on my indoor grill. Those few fat spots that remain should not affect transmission.

First a little background.

Matt Damon was born Matthew Paige Damon on October 8, 1970 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Kent Damon, was a stockbroker and realtor; his mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an early childhood education professor at Lesley University. He has a brother, Kyle, three years older.

In 1973, when his parents were divorced, Matt and Kyle moved with their mother to a six-family communal house near Harvard.

Now – on to the interview.

“It’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.” – Matt Damon

me – Good morning, Mr. Damon, is this a good time for an interview with my favorite handsome, talented male movie star?

Matt – Call me Matt. I am always up for an interview with anyone who calls me their favorite handsome talented actor. Even though it is 6 am.

me – Forgive me, Matt, I forgot that California is four hours earlier than Florida. Mea culpa!

Matt – I think the ‘culpa’ may be mine for picking up the phone.

me – My sincere apologies. Did you have a stable home environment?

Matt – “My mother is a professor of early-childhood development, and she raised my brother and me by the book.

“She would say things like, ‘In six months, you’re going to feel some anger toward me, and it’s OK’ – as if she knew it all in advance. It was an annoying way to be raised. You couldn’t define yourself, because you already had been defined by her.

“She once refused to submit me to standardized testing telling the administrator, ‘it's stupid, it won't tell you anything, and it'll just make him nervous.’”

me – What was it like living in a ‘communal house?’

Matt – The first words that come to mind are ‘no privacy whatever.’

me – I hear you. Tell me how you met your best buddy, Ben Affleck.

Matt – Ben lived only two blocks away and we became good friends – I was ten and he was eight – when we discovered we both had the “acting bug.” Our mothers who both worked in education knew each other and encouraged us to spend time together. Ben was already an acting pro since he had appeared in a PBS-TV series.

As high school students at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, we took drama classes together. Although we were in different grades, we discovered we had “identical interests.”

“We obsessed over acting, I know it’s odd. But Ben was my best friend. We shared this dream. We enabled each other. Without Ben, I wouldn’t have known where to start.

“We were both inspired by our drama teacher, Gerry Speca, although Ben got the biggest roles and the longest speeches.

“We held ‘business meetings’ to discuss our acting prospects and even shared a bank account.”

me – How did you earn money while in high school?

Matt – “We had many summer jobs together working as construction workers and movie ushers.”

me – And after high school?

Matt – I entered Harvard University as an English major in 1988 and planned to graduate with the class of ’92. "Ben moved to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College."

me – Did you graduate?

Matt – Almost. I skipped a number of classes to pursue acting projects: small parts in small films. My first role was as Steamer in the movie, “Mystic Pizza.”

me – Did you have much dialogue?

Matt – Not so much. My only line in the entire film was, while eating lobster, “Mom, do you want my green stuff?" (laughing)

me – Not too auspicious a start.

Matt – True, and suspicious, too. I never did find out what that 'green stuff' was. But the acting bug had taken hold.

“I was gonna be getting out of school in two or three months when I got a part in the movie, “Geronimo: An American Legend.” I went out to Los Angeles and stayed with Ben. (He had dropped out of college, too). I slept on his floor. I brought my Act I of the “Good Will Hunting” script and gave it to him.”

. . . or how a long-shot film by two struggling actors became one of Hollywood’s biggest success stories.

me – When did you begin writing “Good Will Hunting”?

Matt – “I was in my fifth year at Harvard, and I had a few electives left. There was this play-writing class and the culmination of it was to write a one-act play, and I just started writing a movie. So I handed the professor at the end of the semester a 40-some-odd-page document, and said, ‘Look, I might have failed your class, but it is the first act of something longer.’"

My professor, Anthony Kubiak, said my script was "'very authentic and real.'’"

me – How did you get Ben Affleck involved in co-writing the script with you?

Matt – I asked him: “Will you help me write this? I’m not sure what it is or where to go. So we started writing it sort of back and forth. It was the first thing we woke up thinking about and the last thing we thought about before going to bed.

“I didn’t realize the stereotype at the time was that every actor has a screenplay.”

me – How would you describe your film script in one paragraph?

Matt – It was about a bunch of rough-around-the-edges ‘Southie’ kids from Boston scraping their way through life. The hook is: one of them, Will Hunting, is a genius. He is a guy who wows MIT, humiliates Harvard grad students, and turns down job offers from the NSA (National Security Agency).

me – I know that the production company, Castle Rock, purchased the script first and kept it a year before turning it down. How did Miramax get into the picture?

Matt – “Our film would never have been made if not for Robin Williams.” Miramax agreed to produce it when Robin signed on as the psychotherapist in the movie.

"Ben and I owe everything to him. He said yes to our movie and he got it made. I could never thank him enough. I look around at the life I have and how blessed I feel, and so much of it started with him."

“I basically started performing for my mother, going, ‘Love me!’ What drives you to perform is the need for that primal connection. When I was little, my mother was funny with me, and I started to be funny for her, and I learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another person.” – Robin Williams

me –What was it like working with Robin Williams?

Matt – "He was the funniest person that I ever met in my life. He was the guy who, when the crew was flagging, he would stop everything and do 20 minutes of standup off the top of his head that literally had everybody on the floor, then be like, 'OK, let's get back to work.'"

me – In January 1998, "Good Will Hunting" became a sleeper hit, eventually grossing $226 million on a modest $10 million budget, and garnering nine Academy Award nominations.

Robin Williams won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and you, Matt, and Ben walked away with the award for Best Original Screenplay.

Matt – “And both Ben and I took our moms as dates to the ceremony.”

me – Tell me about your role in the film, "Courage under Fire," which was released in 1996. You were a standout in that film as the drug-addicted U.S. Army medic.

Matt – “I was 25, and it didn’t look as if "Good Will Hunting’" was getting made. Then I read this script that had a role I thought bigger actors had somehow missed.

“I thought it was a real opportunity to show the devastation of combat and drugs. All it took was me not cracking. I went on this really unhealthy diet.

"For four months I ate basically chicken, egg whites and lettuce. I ran 13 miles a day. I went from 200 pounds down to 140. When there was no fat left to lose, my body started eating into muscle. It was very dangerous, but in my mind I was proving something: ‘See what I’m willing to do?'"

me – What is the scariest thing you have had to do in a movie … so far?

Matt – “One of the scariest things I've ever had to do was the underwater scene in the second Bourne movie, where the car goes into the river and I've lost the love of my life. I didn't want to do that at all.

"So I wouldn't be constantly aware of how scared I am of drowning, I had to go to a pool with this great stunt guy … a couple of times a week for a month or so to train me to relax underwater without an oxygen mask and with a blindfold and, later, to do simple tasks underwater like tying a shoe.

"That first night I woke up probably four times gasping for breath, thinking I was drowning. It was terrible. When you make movies, you end up being trained to do really weird things you don't do anywhere else.”

me – What is an important lesson you have learned from making movies?

Matt – "I'm not Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Those guys walk into a room and the room changes. I think there's something more ... not average, but everyman about me. People are constantly telling me: ‘My brother looks just like you.’

"The minute people started saying, `He's the all-American guy,' my career got interesting. It liberated me. Instantly it was an image directors could f*** with."

• Matt is married to Argentine-born Luciana Barroso whom he met in Miami, where she was working as a bartender. They married in a private civil ceremony on December 9, 2005, at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. They have four daughters: Isabella, Gia and Stella, and Alexia, Luciana's daughter from a prior marriage.

• He dropped out of Harvard 12 credits short of graduating to pursue his acting career.

• He quit smoking after visiting a hypnotist in Los Angeles.

• Matt is a big fan of the Boston Red Sox and he tries to attend their games whenever possible.

Jeremy Renner, the British actor who became famous for his role in "The Hurt Locker," played a different super spy, Aaron Cross, in the movie, "The Bourne Legacy,’" in 2012. A sequel had been planned for that role as well but now may be delayed.

• He has also formed strong friendships with his "Oceans" films co-stars, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, with whom he works on charity projects including ONE Campaign, H2O Africa Foundation, Feeding America, and Water.org.

• Matt Damon became the 2,343rd person to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007. He reacted to the award by stating: "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."

• Matt’s paycheck for the 1998 film, “Rounders,” was $600,000. His paycheck for the 2007 film, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” was $20,000,000.

“How do you like them apples?” (Famous line from ‘Good Will Hunting.’)

Important Footnote:

I borrowed actual language – the real words Matt Damon has spoken in genuine interviews with genuine journalists. Every word you read in quotes and italics after his name are his words. Promise!

Sources:

Maggie Bullock, ‘Elle’ December 15, 2011 … Katie Couric, ‘Yahoo Global News’ 2015 … Janelle Nanos, ‘Boston Magazine’ February 26, 2013 … Dorothy Pomerantz, ‘Forbes’ August 6, 2007 … Dotson Rader, ‘Parade Magazine’ November 30, 2003 … Colleen Walsh, ‘Harvard Gazette’ April 25, 2013

© Copyright BJ Rakow, Ph.D. 2015. All rights reserved. Author, "Much of What You Know about Job Search Just Ain't So."