Matt Damon
Brilliant and buff — a Hollywood wunderkind comes of age
While stuck in an English class at Harvard in the early ’90s, a young Matt Damon had thoughts of escape. He wanted to be an actor, and he had his sights set on Hollywood. He even worked on a script in class about an unnoticed genius toiling away at a premier Boston school until his gift could not be denied. Though the character in the script was a janitor and his skill was math, the connection to Damon himself was clear. A few years later, that script would evolve into the film Good Will Hunting, earning Damon and his friend Ben Affleck, who grew up together in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and providing Damon with the role that would turn him into a star.
He had made the most of his boyish, blond pretty-boy looks playing preppies and blue-collar heroes in School Ties, Courage Under Fire, and The Rainmaker, but after Good Will Hunting, he would score important roles in major productions, such as Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (2001), and Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001). These films, and especially his queer take on Ripley, showed off his range as an actor, but it wasn’t until 2002, when he muscled up to play Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity, that Damon found himself atop a blockbuster franchise.
To his credit, he’s stayed creative since achieving A-list status, taking on interesting character parts between Bourne and Ocean outings (check out the trailer for Jason Bourne, above). While playing a reprehensible mole in Scorsese’s The Departed (2006), a portly geek VP in Soderbergh’s The Informant! (2009), or Liberace’s sexy young boyfriend in Soderbergh’s HBO movie, Behind the Candelabra (2013), Damon, who’s now a salt-and-peppered hunk at 45, has always been great at holding our attention.
