What Happened to Matt Damon?

By CelebPaid Editorial Team · 8 min read

Matt Damon.Image via Wikimedia Commons

The Rise to Fame

Matthew Paige Damon ( DAY-mən; born October 8, 1970) is an American actor, film producer, and screenwriter. He was ranked among Forbes's most bankable stars in 2007, and in 2010 was one of the highest-grossing actors of all time. He has received various awards and nominations, including an Academy Award, an Actor Award, and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for three British Academy Film Awards and seven Primetime Emmy Awards.

Damon made his acting debut in the film Mystic Pizza (1988) before gaining prominence in 1997 when he and Ben Affleck wrote and starred in Good Will Hunting, which won them the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. He further established himself as a leading man by starring as Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Jason Bourne in the Bourne franchise (2002–2007; 2016), and Linus Caldwell in the Ocean's trilogy (2001–2007). He received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing a rugby player in Invictus (2009) and received another nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for playing an astronaut stranded on Mars in The Martian (2015). He also acted in The Rainmaker (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Syriana (2005), The Departed (2006), The Informant! (2009), True Grit (2010), Contagion (2011), Interstellar (2014), Ford v Ferrari (2019), The Last Duel (2021), Air (2023), Oppenheimer (2023), and played the titular character in The Odyssey (2026).

On television, Damon portrayed Scott Thorson in the HBO biopic Behind the Candelabra (2013), for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. He was Emmy-nominated for his guest role in 30 Rock in 2011 and for hosting Saturday Night Live in 2019. He also produced the reality series Project Greenlight (2001–2015) as well as the film Manchester by the Sea (2016). Damon has performed voiceover work in both animated and documentary films and established two production companies with Affleck, Artists Equity and the former Pearl Street Films. He has been involved in charitable work with organizations including the One Campaign, H2O Africa Foundation, Feeding America, and Water.org.

The Peak Years

Early life and education

Matthew Paige Damon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 8, 1970, the second son of Kent Telfer Damon, a stockbroker, and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an early childhood education professor at Lesley University. His father has English and Scottish ancestry, while his mother is of Finnish and Swedish descent; her family surname had been changed from Pajari to Paige. Damon and his family moved to Newton for two years, where he lived in a two-bedroom duplex next to the historian and author Howard Zinn. His parents divorced when he was two years old, and he and his brother returned with their mother to Cambridge, where they lived in a six-family communal house. His brother, Kyle, is a sculptor and artist. Damon has said that, as a teenager, he felt lonely, as if he did not belong, and that his mother's by-the-book approach to child-rearing had made it hard for him to define his own identity.

Damon attended Cambridge Alternative School and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, and was a good student. He acted in several high-school theater productions, and has credited his drama teacher, Gerry Speca, with having an important artistic influence on him, while noting wryly that Speca gave Ben Affleck (Damon's close friend and schoolmate) the "biggest roles and longest speeches".

What Changed

He attended Harvard University as a member of the class of 1992, residing in Lowell House, but left before receiving his degree to take a lead role in the film Geronimo: An American Legend. While at Harvard, as an exercise for an English class, Damon wrote an essay in the form of a film treatment that was later developed into the screenplay Good Will Hunting (for which he received an Academy Award). Damon also took Gregory Nagy's course on the Ancient Greek Hero. While at Harvard, Damon took a drama/acting class and once did a scene with fellow classmate and future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. At Harvard, Damon was a member of the Delphic Club, one of the university's Final Clubs. In 2013, he was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal.

1988–1999: Early work and breakthrough

Damon entered Harvard University in 1988, where he appeared in student theater plays, such as Burn This and A... My Name is Alice. Later, he made his film debut at the age of 18, with a single line of dialogue in the romantic comedy Mystic Pizza. As a student at Harvard, he acted in small roles such as in the TNT original film Rising Son and the ensemble prep-school drama School Ties. He left the school in 1992, a semester (12 credits) shy of completing his Bachelor of Arts in English to feature in Geronimo: An American Legend in Los Angeles, erroneously expecting the movie to be a big success. Damon next appeared as an opiate-addicted soldier in 1996's Courage Under Fire, for which he lost 40 pounds (18 kg) in 100 days on a self-prescribed diet and fitness regimen. Courage Under Fire gained him critical notice; The Washington Post called his performance "impressive".

Where Matt Damon Is Now

During the early 1990s, Damon and Affleck wrote Good Will Hunting (1997), a screenplay about a young mathematics genius and an extension of a screenplay Damon wrote as an assignment at Harvard, having integrated advice from director Rob Reiner, screenwriter William Goldman, and writer/director Kevin Smith. He asked Affleck to perform the scenes with him in front of the class and, when Damon later moved into Affleck's Los Angeles apartment, they began working on the script more seriously. The film, which they wrote mainly during improvisation sessions, was set partly in their hometown of Cambridge, and drew from their own experiences. They sold the screenplay to Castle Rock Entertainment in 1994, but after a conflict with the company, they convinced Miramax to purchase the script. The film received critical praise; Quentin Curtis of The Daily Telegraph found "real wit and vigour, and some depth" in their writing and Emanuel Levy of Variety wrote that Damon "gives a charismatic performance in a demanding role that's bound to catapult him to stardom. Perfectly cast, he makes the aching, step-by-step transformation of Will realistic and credible." It received nine Academy Awards nominations, including Best Actor for Damon; he and Affleck won the Oscar and Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. He and Affleck were each paid salaries of $600,000, while the film grossed over $225 million at the worldwide box office. The two later parodied their roles from the film in Kevin Smith's 2001 movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Of his "overnight success" through Good Will Hunting, Damon said that by that time he had been working in the cinema for 11 years but still found the change "nearly indescribable—going from total obscurity to walking down a street in New York and having everybody turn and look". Before the film, Damon played the lead in the critically acclaimed drama The Rainmaker (1997), where he was recognized by the Los Angeles Times as "a talented young actor on the brink of stardom." For the role, Damon regained most of the weight he had lost for Courage Under Fire. After meeting Damon on the set of Good Will Hunting, director Steven Spielberg cast him in the brief title role in the 1998 World War II film Saving Private Ryan. He co-starred with Edward Norton in the 1998 poker film Rounders, playing a reformed gambler in law school who must return to playing high-stakes poker to help a friend pay off loan sharks. Despite meager earnings at the box office, it is considered one of the best poker movies of all time.

Damon then portrayed antihero Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), a role for which he lost 11 kilograms (25 lb). Damon said he wanted to display his character's humanity and honesty on screen despite his criminal actions. An adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel of same name, the film co-starred Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cate Blanchett, and received praise from critics. "Damon outstandingly conveys his character's slide from innocent enthusiasm into cold calculation", according to Variety magazine. In Dogma (1999), Damon plays a fallen angel who discusses pop culture as intellectual subject matter with Affleck's character. The film received generally positive reviews, but proved controversial among religious groups who deemed it blasphemous.

Legacy

2000–2008: Worldwide recognition

In 2000, Damon, Affleck, and producers Chris Moore and Sean Bailey founded the production company LivePlanet to create the Emmy-nominated documentary series Project Greenlight, which aimed to find and fund worthwhile film projects by novice filmmakers. Among the company's projects was the short-lived mystery-hybrid series Push, Nevada.

Damon's attempts at leading characters in romantic dramas such as 2000's All the Pretty Horses and The Legend of Bagger Vance were commercially and critically unsuccessful. Variety said of his work in All the Pretty Horses: "He just doesn't quite seem like a young man who's spent his life amidst the dust and dung of a Texas cattle ranch. Nor does he strike any sparks with [Penelope] Cruz." He was similarly deemed "uncomfortable being the center" of Robert Redford's The Legend of Bagger Vance by Peter Rainer of New York magazine.

During this period, Damon joined two lucrative film series—Ocean's Trilogy (2001–2007) and Bourne (2002–2016)—and produced the television series Project Greenlight (2001–2005, 2015). He co-starred as thief Linus Caldwell in the former's first installment, Steven Soderbergh's 2001 ensemble film Ocean's Eleven, a remake of the Rat Pack's Ocean's 11...

Frequently asked questions