Never mind George Clooney. If there’s ever going to be another movie star in the White House then our money is on Matt Damon. Even in a fug of jet lag he’s a cheery, unshowy fellow: “I was in Sydney and then Korea and then . . . where am I?” he says, peering comically through the nearest window.
Box-office pundits like to call him Hollywood's most bankable everyman. It's a description that reminds us of how "relatable" he is as, say, the astronaut in Ridley Scott's The Martian. But it does make him sound like the guy in dad jeans. And that's just fine with Damon; after all, he is a guy in dad jeans. "I don't put too much stock into what the perception of me is," he says.
“I don’t mind being an everyman in so far as it has gotten me all these roles in all these movies that I’ve loved working on. Everyman means I can do that in a movie or I can play against that. And it’s worked out pretty good so far, right?”
It certainly has. Damon made an inauspicious big screen debut alongside – or more accurately way, way under – Julia Roberts, Annabeth Gish and Lili Taylor in 1988's Mystic Pizza.
Almost 10 years later, he had amassed a solid body of work – an uncredited spot in Field of Dreams, a supporting role in Courage Under Fire – when Good Will Hunting (1997) catapulted Damon and his childhood chum Ben Affleck into the limelight.
Sitting in an airy hotel suite in London almost two decades later, the 45-year-old star still can’t believe his luck. “It took me years – really, honestly years – to process and internalise what was going on,” he says. “I’m on a set with Robin Williams. What? How? It was so surreal. And that was just the beginning.
“We were shooting the movie in Toronto and Ben and Casey [Affleck] and Cole Hauser and I were all living together. So we watched the Oscars on television. Like lots of people do. We had the little cheat sheets. And we filled out our choices and had side-bets going.
“And then the next year, Ben and I were sitting in the front row. It was completely crazy. It wasn’t like we had a buffer year when we got to sit somewhere in the audience. We went from the couch at home to being in the song that Billy Crystal sings at the beginning of the show.”
The suddenness of his stardom did not spoil him, he insists. “It was years later before I thought I had a career. It was years later before I felt secure. I think for all of us – for anyone in movies but for actors in particular – there’s an underlying insecurity that comes with the profession. You do feel like it could go away at some point.”
Saving career It almost did. The toast of Hollywood at the end of the last millennium won acclaim for his work on Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and John Dahl's Rounders. But a run of bad luck and box-office fizzles – The Legend of Bagger Vance, Finding Forrester, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron – seemed to take the lustre off his glittering new reputation. Ocean's Eleven did raise his stock in 2001. But it took The Bourne Identity – a film, Damon says flatly, that "saved his career" – for both studios and audiences to realise what Matt Damon was for.
Doug Liman's 2002 adaptation of Robert Ludlum's novel of the same name was a fraught affair, subject to reshoots and delays. It was a hit, nonetheless, a hit that paved the way for an unlikely partnership between Damon and director Paul Greengrass, co-author of Spycatcher, and the helmer behind such gritty recreations as Bloody Sunday and United 93.
The pair have reunited for Jason Bourne, the fifth film in the sequence, having previously sworn "never again" following a troubled shoot on 2007's The Bourne Ultimatum.
The thrilling new movie sees Bourne dashing between various locations – riots in Athens, mega-conference in Las Vegas – as he becomes embroiled in a sinister deal between a tech superstar and the CIA.
“Paul comes from documentaries so he knows what the world really looks like,” says Damon. “When he stages something he knows how to make sure it doesn’t look staged. When you watch the riots in Athens in the film it looks like something that could be playing on CNN. Because Paul is in there tweaking every little thing. He knows what a real riot looks like. He’s been in the middle of them.”
Greengrass’s journalistic background has come to define the Bourne sequence, but it also makes for common ground with his leading man.
"He's very engaged with the arguments of the day," says Damon. "Any day. He's incredibly well read. He gave me this book a couple of years ago. He said 'This is my book of the year'. And it was a biography of Lyndon Johnson – The Passage of Power – the fourth in a series of five by Robert Caro. It's an incredible book. But I thought to myself: 'This guy, my friend, he's an English guy. What is he doing reading a biography of Lyndon Johnson?' I haven't read any biographies of Maggie Thatcher recently. He's just somebody who is very well read and who knows a lot, and who cares about the world."
Political nuance Damon is a Democrat who has raised funds for Elizabeth Warren, but he’s a nuanced enough political thinker to have publicly criticised US president Barack Obama despite twice voting for him. As we meet, he has just returned from a grim chat about Brexit with his chum Paul. Brexit has troubling implications, he says, and not just for Britain.
“After Brexit ,we can’t sit back as Americans and think: it’s not possible for Trump to be elected president. It’s a real possibility that this guy will be president. I will do my part as a citizen to ensure that doesn’t happen. Because I genuinely believe – as do a lot of my Republican friends – that this is a bad idea. They won’t vote for him. I’m hoping that’s a more generalised trend. I genuinely think he’s dangerous.
"You've heard the thing about his hands, right? So [Rolling Stone publisher] Jann Wenner is one of the people who wrote that Trump has small hands 30 years ago. And every year since, he receives a package in the mail, containing a picture of Donald Trump's hands signed by Donald Trump. Putting someone that thin-skinned and petty in the White House would be genuinely dangerous. For all of us."
Acting knack Damon’s mother – an early childhood education professor – first realised her son had a knack for acting while watching he and his brother transform into superheroes by tying tea-towels around their necks. Damon, however, has not followed his chum Ben Affleck into the comic book universe but has, instead, plumped for the real-world girth of Bourne. Is that harder to do, after 40?
“Forty-five,” he laughs. “It’s harder. But it’s the same thing. Only now it’s a full-time job. I only did three meals a day: protein, vegetables, no carbohydrates. Two visits to the gym a day for 90-minute, really high-intensity workouts. It’s so boring. That’s the worst part.”
Having spent his childhood falling out of trees with his only brother, before moving on to fraternity life in Harvard, Damon now lives in an entirely female household with his wife Luciana Barroso and four daughters: Alexia (17), Luciana’s daughter from a previous relationship; Isabella (9), Gia (6) and Stella (5).
“It’s a totally different universe,” he says. “But I love it. It’s certainly fun to watch them experience the world. How different they are from their male counterparts. It changes your brain.”
Do they like having Bourne back around the house?
“It definitely makes my wife happy,” he laughs. “But my oldest daughter – it upsets her – because she can’t call me Matty Fatty. Which is my nickname.”
He juts out his belly and pats it with no little pride: “But look. Matty Fatty is back.”
