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‘THIS is the first time I’ve done an interview with an ice pack down my pants,” Matt Damon says, having retreated to the relative comfort of his trailer on a wet, chilly New York film set. The culprit is a pulled groin muscle, sustained during a full morning of sprinting through Manhattan streets in the pouring rain for The Adjustment Bureau, a romantic thriller based on a Philip K Dick story.

The last set-up of the morning calls for Damon, wearing a pork-pie hat, to burst out of a side door and hurtle down an alley that has been rigged with sprinklers. This is the start of the climactic chase, which takes his character, a political candidate, through downtown Manhattan. While this particular shot will amount to just a couple of seconds in the finished film, Damon is giving it the careful consideration befitting a thinking man’s action hero.

Between takes, he walks over to a cluster of video monitors to watch playbacks and confer with George Nolfi, the film’s director. Nolfi, whose writing credits include two of Damon’s films, Ocean’s Twelve and The Bourne Ultimatum, talks about the rhythm of the sequence and the music he is planning to use for it. They discuss the impact of the door smacking into the wall. Damon suggests ways he could orientate his body in relation to the camera. Details matter to Damon, who has put together his quietly impressive resume with a curatorial eye, working his way to the top of the Hollywood heap while avoiding the traps of a typical A-list career. “The leading-man stuff doesn’t come easily to me,” he says. “I’ve always felt like a character actor.”

This may sound like false modesty from someone who, at 39, has yet to lose the golden-boy aura of his break-out role in Good Will Hunting (1997), a vehicle he wrote for himself with his boyhood friend, Ben Affleck. But the increasing variety of Damon’s roles and the almost perversely self-effacing ease with which he sinks into them suggest the thoughtful, restless sensibility of an actor who, as frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh put it, “is thinking about expanding himself as opposed to presenting himself as a movie star”.

In Soderbergh’s acerbic character study The Informant!, Damon transforms himself into a doughy, delusional executive who exposes an agribusiness price-fixing scheme. In Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, he’s a rugby captain entrusted by Nelson Mandela with bringing socially unifying sporting glory to post-apartheid South Africa. And he re-teams with Paul Greengrass, who directed him in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, for Green Zone, in which he plays a chief warrant officer on a futile hunt for weapons of mass destruction in newly occupied Iraq.

Damon has made two films with Gus Van Sant, three with Paul Greengrass, five with Soderbergh (including all three Ocean’s movies). He has also worked with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Terry Gilliam and Anthony Minghella. “I’ve learned a lot just by standing next to these great directors and watching them,” Damon says.

He shared an Oscar for the screenplay of Good Will Hunting and wants to direct some day. (Affleck has already made the leap, to some acclaim, with Gone Baby Gone in 2007.) Until he finds the right project, he’s happy to keep “arming myself with information,” he said. “Clint didn’t start until he was 39, and he’s had 40 great years.”

The hugely successful Bourne movies established Damon’s athletic bona fides. It was Franka Potente, his love interest in the first two Bourne films, who taught him that “most people look ridiculous when they’re running”, he says. She told him to study videos of himself in motion. But what Damon does in the Bourne movies is trickier than just making an intense cardio workout look good. “It’s the way he frames his physical choices as an actor,” Greengrass says.

He singles out the foot chase through Berlin midway through The Bourne Supremacy that ends with Bourne jumping on a train. “The entire character hinged on that one dialogue-less moment,” Greengrass says, in which Damon “had to convey three different ideas: first, he’s evaded his pursuers; second, he feels a gnawing self-disgust because he’s discovered he’s a killer; and third, there’s a huge implicit sense that he’s got a plan.”

For The Informant!, a very different kind of physical performance, he gained 30lb and had his face puffed up with prosthetics. The disguise obscures “the boundaries of the character”, Damon says. “It was all a metaphor for this guy being kind of undefined.”

That more or less sums up the quintessential Matt Damon role: the blank canvas hero. For him, the appeal of embodying such ambiguous characters is in peeling back their inscrutable facades. “As an actor you have to make decisions about what their motivations are,” he says, “even if you don’t let on.”

Damon’s method, discreet to the point of invisibility, is premised on not letting on, not making it seem like work.

Morgan Freeman, who plays Mandela in Invictus, says Damon is, “like myself, a journeyman”, meaning it as a compliment. “There’s no strain in his work.” But understatement is often overlooked, as Damon knows. “There’s a style of acting that tends to get rewarded,” he says, adding: “It’s not what I do.” (His one acting Oscar nomination was for Good Will Hunting)

That has never stopped directors snapping him up, and Damon is solidly booked for much of the next year. After The Adjustment Bureau, he’ll work with Eastwood on supernatural thriller Hereafter. He’ll also be in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel True Grit; George Clooney’s Hamdan vs Rumsfeld, about the US government’s case against Osama bin Laden’s driver; and Soderbergh’s film about Liberace, with Michael Douglas as the kitschy pianist and Damon as his bodyguard and lover.

Damon says he is also becoming more comfortable using his celebrity to help causes he supports, though he has made sure to work on nonpartisan issues such as clean water for the world’s poor through Water.org, a non-profit group he helped found. “I’m trying to get involved with something you can’t really argue with,” he says.

But he’s also not afraid to show his political stripes.

Last autumn, he publicly expressed horror at the prospect of Sarah Palin “having the nuclear codes”. And while both he and Greengrass were careful to characterise Green Zone as foremost a thriller, Damon seems more willing to discuss the film in political terms. “It’s the original question of where were the WMDs,” he says, adding the movie chronicles “the massive blunders that came at such a huge price”.

Damon’s overnight success made him a tempting target for a while, as in Team America: World Police, the animated satire in which the Matt Damon puppet is capable of uttering only his own name. But like all good post-modern celebrities, he also has offered himself up for self-mocking deflation (including a much-viewed mock music video in which Sarah Silverman sings about her torrid affair with Damon). Having fun with his own image is, of course, a savvier form of control. “You’re not waiting around to get ambushed,” he says.

Damon lives with his wife of four years, Luciana, and their three daughters in New York. “Barring me getting up on a bar and dancing or leaving my wife for Lindsay Lohan, there’s no story to update,” he says. “Every six months, someone comes and squeezes off a picture of me and, yup, I’m still married.”

• The Informant! is in cinemas from tomorrow. Invictus follows in February.

Source:  Scotsman

STEVEN SODERBERGH’s movie CHE was so lo budget,  MATT DAMON used a promotional trip for THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM to bag a free flight to Europe to film his part.
The moviemaker asked Damon to appear in the biopic, about Latino revolutionary Che Guevara, and he was quick to sign up to the picture.

But the shoot clashed with overseas promo work for Damon’s 2007 action thriller – so the actor used the opportunity to get free flights from the U.S. to Europe for him and his wife Lucy.

He tells Britain’s Total Film magazine, “Steven called me and says, ‘Will you do a day on Che?’ They were in the south of Spain. I said, ‘Lucy and I are going to be there.’

“I had some press to do there for The Bourne Ultimatum. So the studio flew us there and we snuck in because Che was the lower-budget movie. We let Bourne get us to Europe and then I went down (to film Che).”

Source: New Kerala

Matt Damon would be perfect, if he didn’t seem a bit too perfect.

He studied at Harvard. He won an Oscar for writing Good Will Hunting. He starred in the Bourne movies, which were adored by critics and audiences alike.

He’s a family man. He speaks out on important political issues. He donates not only his money but his time to charity.

He stays out of the tabloids. He’s charming on talk shows. Indie film fans love him for the Kevin Smith stuff. The masses love him for Ocean’s Eleven. His hair is always neat. He dresses nicely, but doesn’t overdo it. He’s manly yet sensitive. Serious yet funny.

He’s still best friends with his childhood buddy Ben Affleck. He doesn’t smoke. Heck, he’s the Sexiest Man Alive.

The thing about people who are too perfect, though, is that you always wonder what really goes on in their minds.

It’s like those Star Trek episodes where they find a utopia, but then there’s always something weird about the place, like everyone has wicked halitosis or something.

The thing that makes Damon such an interesting case of ‘too good to be true’ is that he, time and again, takes on movie roles that explore this sort of theme. It’s as if he knows there’s something wrong with the fact that there’s nothing wrong with him.

JASON BOURNE IN THE BOURNE MOVIES (2002-07)

In the first Bourne movie, The Bourne Identity, Jason Bourne is a cypher, an empty vessel with no memories, but possessing an infinite capacity to kick butt.

By the final movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, we learn that he was trained by the government to be a killing machine, a job he apparently signed up for voluntarily.

The Bourne movies capture perfectly the Damon Dichotomy: He seems like a nice guy, but then on the other hand he’s capable of beating a man to a pulp with a rolled-up magazine.

He wants to be good, but he was born to be bad.

TOM RIPLEY IN THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY (1999)

Ripley is one of Damon’s signature roles, and the one where he perhaps makes the best use of his suspicious likeability.

The story is that Ripley is a poor kid who gets a taste of the good life, and then wants more.

Sent on an errand by a wealthy father to bring his ne’er-do-well son back from Europe, Ripley instead assumes the young man’s identity.

When flashing his wide all-American smile isn’t enough to keep the ruse going, he resorts to more desperate – and deadly – means.

COLIN SULLIVAN IN THE DEPARTED (2006)

In a role that seems almost custom-made for him, Damon plays Colin Sullivan, a Boston gangster who is hand-picked by mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) to infiltrate the police department.

Sullivan becomes, seemingly, a model officer, all the while feeding information back to Costello.

It seems that almost every word uttered by Sullivan is a lie, and though it is apparent that he is proud of his ability to beguile the gullible, he is also racked with guilt.

As complex a performance to pull off as one could imagine, Damon seems to handle it with ease.

THE INFORMANT (2009)

Playing corporate whistle-blower Mark Whitacre, who seems to be one thing but is really another, who makes an art of deception, and whose inside and outside don’t mesh, Damon gives perhaps the performance of his life.

Anyone who knows anything about the real-life case of Whitacre will know that the agri-business executive wasn’t always on the up-and-up as he spied on his employer for the FBI.

A seemingly straightforward fellow and a supposedly nice guy, Whitacre lied to his boss, lied to the agents who trusted him, lied to his wife, and even lied to himself.

Through his voiceover in the film, we also learn that he has an obsession with creatures which seem to be one thing, but are really another, such as insects who take on the colouration of poisonous insects, without really being poisonous.

LOKI IN DOGMA (1993)

With his blond, boyish cherub looks, who better than Damon to play an angel?

But wait, Loki is not the sort of Angel you would find on a stained-glass window or on top of a Christmas tree. Loki is a fallen angel – and he’s nuts.

Not only does Loki have an impossibly foul mouth and a perverted mind, he’s also a stone-cold killer.

As he and his angel pal Bartleby (Ben Affleck) try to make their way back into heaven, Loki makes a detour to kill a meeting room full of corporate idolaters in cold blood.

Like the bit where he tells the otherwise pure-hearted office lady that he’s going to shoot her for not saying ‘bless you’ when he sneezed.

Putting on weight, that is.

Hollywood heartthrob Matt Damon, 39, undergoes a drastic transformation in The Informant!, in a role that might win him the coveted golden bald man come Oscar time next year.

Here, he speaks about piling on the poundage, working with director Steven Soderbergh and bluffing as a profession.

You gained 14kg for this role. What was the motivation for transforming yourself?

Once Steven made the decision to take the movie in a more comic direction tonally, it became less important to do rigorous character studies of the actual people. It was more about having fun with this terrific script.

We had the script for seven years and we were kind of sitting on it, so it was actually more like a play in the sense that it’s really well-written.

We would refer back to it once or twice a year. Steven and I worked together three times in those intervening years and we would always say, ‘Yeah, I read it again last night. It’s still really good.’

Did the extra weight change you on a day-to-day basis?

No, it felt fantastic, actually. I’ve never had that much fun making a movie, really.

I just ate whatever I wanted to and thought about nothing but this screenplay and the other actors.

It was really nice to not think about anything else, compared to a Jason Bourne movie where I’ve got to go to the gym after a day of work. I just prefer to eat. (Laughs)

And early in your career you lost 18kg for a role in Courage Under Fire.

Yeah, nowhere near as fun as putting it on. (Laughs) Although I did feel differently ultimately.

I talked to Robert De Niro before I did it, as he had done it obviously really famously for Raging Bull where he put on about 27 kg. He said, ‘Well, the first 5kg is really fun, then you have to go to work after that.’

And it was true, almost, because I found the 14kg to be really fun.

Then towards the end, I was kind of like, ‘I should kind of get rid of this weight.’ But I wasn’t really that excited about getting rid of it.

You have worked with Steven multiple times. How does that make the job easier or change the way you approach it?

It makes it much, much easier to do. And I’ve been really lucky with the people that I’ve worked with.

I’ve worked with Steven much more than anyone. Then it was Paul Greengrass, Gus Van Sant and Francis Coppola. I could just repeat those four guys. And Clint Eastwood – I’m going back to work with him again. So, those five guys.

Was there anything that happened in your life where you had to do major bluffing and it worked out for better or worse?

Well, we work in the film business, so we’re on the highwire the whole time!

I think there’s an element where I feel like somebody’s going to show up and tell you that you’re not supposed to be in here making movies, and go get a job.

I definitely feel like the other shoe might drop at any time, and I’ve always felt that way.

Source:  The Electric News Paper Show

SHAKIRA fears she’ll have to write to MATT DAMON’s wife and apologise for namechecking her man on her new album.

The Colombian pop star pines for the movie star in the lyrics of Men In This Town and can only hope his wife isn’t upset with her.

She tells Entertainment Weekly, ‘I know Matt and his wife. We have friends in common. I hope she’s not mad at this. He’s one of those good men. He’s really something.

‘Maybe I should send an apologetic note to the wife and say, ‘Hey, I’m taken too, don’t worry’.’

Source: New Kerala

The couple, which married in December 2005, visited Manhattan’s Hustler Club with friends, according to the New York Daily News.

Bosses reportedly made a special exception for the Bourne Identity star when his wife began to grind against him, stealing the spotlight from the professional dancers.

A source tells the publication, “They got there after 11pm and stayed for two-and-a-half hours. He bought dances for his friends. His wife was dancing for him. The club normally doesn’t allow civilians to dance, but they made an exception for him.”

Source:  Hollywood