Matt Damon Once Shared How Playing Jason Bourne Was Wish Fulfillment
Matt Damon revitalized his career after starring as the tormented action hero Jason Bourne in the Bourne trilogy. Bourne wasn’t known for a glamorous lifestyle like James Bond, for instance. Still, Damon couldn’t help but to have fun playing such an invincible character.
Why Matt Damon considered playing Jason Bourne a fantasy
Damon underwent physical training that he’d never done before to play the action hero Jason Bourne. The amnesiac ex-soldier was a master of many handy skills, including hand-to-hand combat. The intense regimen that Damon did allowed him to look fit and more believable in the role of an expert assassin.
“I’d wake up and do an hour and a half of boxing and then an hour and a half of martial arts and then go out to the desert with this former SWAT guy and we’d clean, assemble and disassemble guns and then shoot them for hours and hours,” Damon once told Ian Watson about his Bourne preparation. “It was like a boy’s dream. Machine guns, M16s, MP5s, Binelli shotguns, it was really fun. I actually took Ed Norton out there one day. I bumped into him in LA and said ‘I’m going to the desert to shoot all these weapons’ and he said ‘oh man, I’m coming’. We had a really good time.”
However, Bourne’s lethal skills weren’t the only things that made him unique. He was also portrayed as being highly observant and fluent in many languages. In those respects, Damon felt playing Bourne was a bit like playing a fantasy character.
“It is a fun role to play,” Damon once told Today. “It’s funny. The whole thing is always this kind of middle-aged fantasy in a way, you know. OK, I’m going to get bonked on the head and I wake up and I speak 12 languages and kick everybody’s ass and this really cool German girl falls in love with me. And so, to a certain extent it’s a bit of wish fulfillment.”
Matt Damon compared playing Jason Bourne to being a superhero
Damon hasn’t starred in any Marvel or DC comic book movies, although he’s done cameos for a few of them in the past. But like most kids, he fantasized about being a superhero in his more formative years. And it was a fantasy he might’ve been able to live by playing the assassin, who already had a lot in common with comic book superheroes.
“I was really into superheroes [when I was a kid]. I loved Spiderman,” Damon said according to UPI. “All the Pretty Horses” star. “Daredevil also was a comic book character I read when I got older — when I was about 10 or 11. I loved that guy too. So these would probably be the guys I would dream of being. … I have pictures of myself that my mom took with me with a towel around my neck constantly. From the time I was two until the time I was probably 10, I was running around with a towel around my neck, pretending to be Superman or Shazam — one of those guys.”
Still, Damon reminded that he wasn’t exactly new to the action genre. But his Bourne trilogy was so much more different than anything he’d ever done.
“I had never done an action movie like this,” Damon said. “‘Saving Private Ryan’ had a lot of action in it, but that obviously was a very different type of film than this is, so I didn’t know if this would be my cup of tea or not, but I had a really good time doing it.”
