Matt Damon Insisted on Losing All Fights in Movies That Weren’t the ‘Bourne’ Films
Matt Damon often credited the Bourne movies for revitalizing his career. But when doing films like those, he was well aware of the risks of being typecast in them. So Damon came up with a creative solution to avoid being pigeonholed.
Matt Damon once shared his secret to avoid Jason Bourne typecasting
Damon feels that his fame has been modest enough that’s allowed him to play a variety of roles in his acting career. More so than some of his more famous contemporaries, who he believes can’t enjoy the same luxury.
“I never felt like a movie star and that’s allowed me to do all the different roles I have done. I never got locked into having to play one thing over and over again,” Damon once told the Sydney Morning Herald. “It also really helps with my work, because I feel that I can still relate to the characters I am playing. Whereas, I think for some people fame can be so overwhelming that it distorts their understanding of how human beings actually engage with one another – because nobody is treating them normally and you eventually start to see that in their work. They can’t really play real people, because they don’t know what it is anymore.”
But Damon has also applied a unique method to avoid being typecast as Jason Bourne in the past. The tortured spy is known for his efficiency in combat, even turning everyday items like magazines into murder weapons. This allowed Bourne to come out of most of his one-on-one fights victorious.
Because of this, Damon tries to play characters who aren’t nearly as indestructible as Bourne.
“Also, just, I try to, if it’s a non-Bourne movie, I try to never win a fight. I think that’s always more interesting,” Damon said in a 2010 interview with Collider. “I remember, on The Departed, like, everyone’s peacock feathers were out, and it’s like, you know, I just remember going to [Martin Scorsese] I saw this whole swath of, like, kind of virgin territory, where on one would tread and I was like, ‘I’m gonna take that!’ Like, ‘Marty, I want to lose every fight I’m in and I don’t want my dick to work.’ That’s the character I want to play.”
Matt Damon recently clarified if he’d be returning for another Jason Bourne movie
It seems that Damon might not be done with the character, yet. The actor reprised his role in 2016’s Jason Bourne, reuniting with the director of his previous two Bourne movies. Last year, Variety reported that another sequel was in the works with Damon attached to star. It was news that the actor cautiously confirmed in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The film didn’t even have a script written at the time, but Damon confided that there have been talks.
“There is a great director named Edward Berger,” Damon said. “[‘All Quiet on the Western Front’] is a fantastic film, and he’s wonderful and he said he had an idea [for Bourne]. I would love to work with him, so he’s working on it. Look, I’m as anxious as you are to see if this thing [happens] — I hope it’s great and that we can do it.”
But he reminded that it might be soon time to pass Bourne down to another star if they want to keep the franchise going.
“At a certain point somebody is going to need to take it over,” he said. “I’m not getting any younger.”
They already experimented with this idea a little by having Jeremy Renner star in Bourne Legacy, although Renner and Damon are the same age.
Having other actors inherit the status of Jason Bourne has also been an idea Damon has been floating around for years.
“But I think what we could do, is like, you know, so you can do some movies with another actor, anyway, whether it’s Ryan Gosling or Russell Crowe or Denzel Washington, and he’s Jason Bourne,” he once said in a separate Collider interview. “And then at the end of his one movie, or two movies, or three movies, you see them getting ready to pass the identity on to me, so it just becomes like a 007, it becomes a name that they give this certain person who’s uniquely positioned.”
