Matt Damon Once Shared Why He Waited Until ‘Jason Bourne’ to Do Shirtless Movie Scenes
Matt Damon returned to the Jason Bourne franchise in 2016. When he did so, however, it marked the first time the actor stripped for the audience on camera.
Matt Damon didn’t want to do beefcake shots for his ‘Bourne’ movies
As is common in action films, Damon had plenty of opportunity to do shirtless scenes while shooting the Bourne trilogy in the 2000s. The actor confided that he went through intense training to properly portray the spy. But it seems this was more for function than for show. Damon intentionally avoided showing the results of his training to the world.
“On the first Bourne movie, I was in the best shape of my life, and we purposely never did a shot of me with my shirt off. There’s one scene where [Bourne’s lover] is pulling the shirt over my head, but what the camera sees are the two bullet holes in my back. It’s not gratuitous; there’s a point to it. I try to stay away from the beefcake shots,” Damon once told Parade.
But it seems Damon changed his mind for Jason Bourne. In one of the movie’s first sequences, a shirtless Jason Bourne is seen knocking out an opponent during a bare knuckle brawl. Damon, however, felt this was necessary to show the kind of situation Bourne was in after a life on the run.
“We always actively said we don’t want to do the ‘beefcake shot’, but it felt right for this one because you want to see him like that, I think, to get a sense of what his life’s been like,” Damon said in a 2016 interview with Yahoo.
Matt Damon found it harder to get back into shape in ‘Jason Bourne’
Damon turned to professional trainer Jason Walsh to help get him back into Bourne shape. His fitness regimen was a mixture of strength training, conditioning and endurance. According to Walsh, Damon was already a hard worker. So getting his body where it needed to be was all a matter of scheduling and following guidelines.
“We do a lot of strength training, but I want people to move well, and then I want them to get strong,” Walsh told Thrillist. “So we reinforce those movement patterns, and then solidify that with strength training. And then we can exploit the body to do things and make it look the way we want it to look. If you’re strong, you can do anything you want and you don’t have to worry about getting injured.”
But Damon asserted that training had only gotten harder after hitting his 40s.
“For the first Bourne movie I was 29 and I thought that was hard work getting into shape,” Damon said. “Now I’m 45 and it’s just brutal. We shot this bare-knuckle fighting scene on my 45th birthday and it was a lot of work to get there. I was on a very strict diet and spent a lot of time in the gym just making myself miserable.”
Walsh also carefully chose Damon’s workouts so the actor wouldn’t end up injuring himself. And it seemed that the trainer’s methods were more than a success given the progress his client made.
“Pull-ups, for instance, will make your back look great with less risk – I’ve seen Matt do them with 70lb [32kg] of added weight around his waist,” Walsh said. “At one point, he got so damn strong and lean and light he could do 30 full-length pull-ups. We’re talking about a guy who probably couldn’t do one real pull-up when I first met him.”
