Matt Damon’s Disappearing Acts – The New York Times

Here’s what we know about Matt Damon: He and his older brother, Kyle, were raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts by their father Kent, a stockbroker, and their mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, professor emeritus of early childhood education. The couple divorced when the children were young, but the relationship remained amicable. “They really did co-parent,” Damon offered, his stance hardening a bit as the questions crept towards the personal. Damon said his mother knew he would become an actor when he was a little boy. According to a family legend, 6-year-old Matt’s reaction was to pretend to put on a makeshift fireman’s suit and put it out when his mother accidentally started a fire in her apartment by forgetting to open a fireplace chimney. He went to Harvard, planned to study English, dropped out in 1993 after a role in western “Geronimo” and never seriously considered taking on a different job. “I used to feel bad when my friends were talking about their future after college and they didn’t know what to do,” Damon said. “I always knew.”

Damon and his wife met in Miami, where he worked as a bartender, and Damon was filming the Farrelly brothers’ slapstick comedy “Stuck on You,” and they’ve been married for 16 years now. Their four daughters range in age from 10 to 23, and their influence means that Taylor Swift and Timothée Chalamet’s online presence is a source of delight for their father, whose social media presence is basically non-existent. The family’s Brooklyn Heights home was the most expensive private residence in the county in 2018 when it was purchased, according to The New York Post. While he was in Australia, he was doing some surfing for fun (“I was pretty scary”) and horseback riding. The last nonfiction book he read was “Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Depise Each Other” by Matt Taibbi. His latest novel: Alan Le “The Searchers,” which May was adapted into a western in 1956 and sent for remake by the producers. said Damon when I nudged him for more. “I don’t know, I sound like a pretty boring guy.”

Whatever you call it, boring or cunning, Damon said he sees himself as “the last of the people who want to protect privacy.” “There’s a new group of people inviting everyone into their daily lives: Hey, I’m at the gym! This is me working! There’s something tactically cool in the sense that you’re controlling the narrative, but it’s the opposite of what I’ve always thought, ‘Go ahead, there’s nothing to see here’ and I just do the work. It’s an idea that knowing where a movie star got his coffee undermines the audience’s ability to suspend disbelief – to imagine – and it’s also an idea we tend to hear from the mouths of old white men, at least those who are lucky enough. Stop feeling the pressure to build an audience without selling too much of themselves. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything.

‘Brad probably wouldn’t even remember how many of the movies I was in were offered to him.’

Even before he became famous, Damon’s drive as an actor has always been towards a certain introversion, an emotional lability that he identified early on in his idols. Recalling the fall of 1987, he recalls an argument he and Affleck had backstage at the rehearsal of the high school production of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s somber morality play “The Visit.” Two boys, students at Cambridge Rindge and the Latin School in Massachusetts, were discussing the types of actors they wanted to be when they grew up. The self-taught movie geeks who have a habit of renting high-quality movies from their local Blockbuster recently watched the 1985 movie version of “Death of a Salesman,” which sparked a conversation. The movie stars Dustin Hoffman, 48, as Willy Loman, 63, the epitome of delusional striving, and you could see that age gap in Hoffman’s performance, according to Affleck and Damon’s estimation. He could see the wheels turning. They wondered: Was acting good when acting made itself known? Did they want to be the actors who did it, or the self-reflective technicians? Would it be preferable to be a chameleon? Damon already knew the answer: he wanted to be like Gene Hackman.

When Damon and Affleck were having this conversation, Hackman was 57, seven years older than Damon is now, the star of classics like “The French Connection” and “Hoosiers,” and the kind of actor who turned into a character but disappeared without creating a character. That’s what the whole show is about – an anti-witch who belittles his transformation. “Hackman can get very deeply into a character,” Damon said, “and he can be very moving while doing very little.” Damon pointed to Hackman’s work in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 paranoid masterpiece “The Conversation.” Legendary film editor Walter Murch, who also worked on “The Conversation” among other classics, noted in his book “In the Blink of an Eye” that Hackman blinked whenever he went for a cut, so he realized that he had adapted. actor to the narrative rhythms of the film. “It was so locked up,” Damon said of Hackman. It was work, like many of Damon’s works, that glorified a movie and yet, paradoxically, you might not even notice as great acting.

William Goldman’s ex I saw in Hollywood that nobody knew anything, which can probably be changed to this now: Everybody knows only one thing and that is what superhero movies sell. Redirecting studios to these films and other pre-existing intellectual property means that the power of actors, even proven stars like Damon, is waning. It is recognizable characters and cinematic universes, not the people who live in it, that can be trusted financially. The less glamorous part puts extra pressure on the stars to choose these parts wisely – a big, underrated aspect of Hollywood acting. Looking back, when you look at a successful actor’s IMDB page, it’s a list of hits, near misses, and duds, but it was all essentially the same: a script. Nothing is predetermined. Anyone who’s been as firmly A-listed as Damon in a 25-year career is good at saying whether a movie will not only be good, but also good and good for him. “Sometimes the right choice for an actor isn’t the greatest movie, but what is the right choice for the moment in an actor’s career,” says George Clooney, who directed Damon on “The Monuments Men” and “Suburbicon.” Matt oscillated between big studio pictures and quirky independent films. Audiences don’t get bored with him because he doesn’t always do the same thing.”