Matt Damon revealed on “Jake’s Takes” while promoting “Oppenheimer” that he once “fell into a depression” halfway through shooting a movie that wasn’t panning out how he hoped it would when he accepted the gig.
“Without naming any particular movies…sometimes you find yourself in a movie that you know, perhaps, might not be what you had hoped it would be, and you’re still making it,” Damon said. “And I remember halfway through production and you’ve still got months to go and you’ve taken your family somewhere, you know, and you’ve inconvenienced them, and I remember my wife pulling me up because I fell into a depression about like, what have I done?”
“She just said, ‘We’re here now’,” Damon continued. “You know, and it was like…I do pride myself, in a large part because of her, at being a professional actor and what being a professional actor means is you go and you do the 15-hour day and give it absolutely everything, even in what you know is going to be a losing effort. And if you can do that with the best possible attitude, then you’re a pro, and she really helped me with that.”
Damon did not name the movie in which he fell into a depression, but he has openly spoken out in the past about acting in films he knew were heading for disaster. One such movie was “The Great Wall,” Zhang Yimou’s poorly-reviewed 2016 monster movie that generated controversy for its white savior narrative. Damon played a European mercenary who is forced to team up with imperial Chinese forces to fend off an alien threat. The film didn’t make it past the $50 million mark in the U.S. despite a $150 million production budget.
“I was like, this is exactly how disasters happen,” Damon said on the “WTF” podcast in 2021 about filming “The Great Wall.” “It doesn’t cohere. It doesn’t work as a movie.”
Damon added at the time, “I came to consider that the definition of a professional actor; knowing you’re in a turkey and going, ‘OK, I’ve got four more months. It’s the up at dawn siege on Hamburger Hill. I am definitely going to die here, but I’m doing it.’ That’s as shitty as you can feel creatively, I think. I hope to never have that feeling again.”
In Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” Damon stars as Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves. The atomic bomb epic opens July 21 from Universal Pictures.
