Matt Damon is arguably one of the hottest actors in the industry, with his handsome charms and incredibly lovable personality collaboratively making him rank among the biggest fan-favorite celebs of all time. Then there’s the iconic body he built up specially for his widely loved role as Jason Bourne, further adding to his already blooming charm.
But what’s surprising is that, even after getting in shape to embody the action hero perfectly, Damon was hardly ever seen with his shirt off for any scene. As it turns out, this wasn’t done unintentionally, but was all on purpose, as per the actor’s personal requests. This is because Damon didn’t want to go shirtless unless he felt the “beefcake shot” was absolutely necessary to the story.
Matt Damon Didn’t Want to Go Shirtless, Even for the Bourne Film Series
It is no news that Damon quite literally got into the best shape of his life through some really grueling training after he got cast in the role of Jason Bourne. However, even after building up that iconic physique, the now-53-year-old actor hesitated to bare himself for the cameras and show off his hard work, doing it only when he felt it to be absolutely necessary.
During an interview with Parade, he got candid about this very thing as he explained that the lack of his shirtless shots in the films was totally on purpose. The Good Will Hunting star said:
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.
He then expressed that while there is a scene where he is *almost* shirtless, it only shows the bullet holes in his back. Talking about it, Matt Damon said:
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.
Surprisingly enough, this regime continued for quite some time throughout the nearly one-and-a-half decades that The Martian star embodied the character. However, just like how everything tends to change, this rule of Damon also faced an end with his last film as the character in 2016, but only because he found it to be significant for the movie.
Matt Damon Went Shirtless in Jason Bourne Because “It felt right for this one”
For years and years and years, Damon had fans yearning to get a good look at the physique he had developed to play the fan-beloved character. But then with 2016’s Jason Bourne, things finally changed. This is because, in one of the sequences of the film, he was seen sporting his perfectly toned body in a bare-knuckle brawl as he knocked out his opponent.
In an interview with Yahoo, The Instigators star explained just why this felt necessary to him at such a closing point in Jason’s story, confessing:
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.
Continuing, he further emphasized his point, saying: “If this movie starts and you look like you’ve been living well – we don’t have a movie. So that shot is supposed to make that statement, that he’s living on the margins.” And, effortlessly enough, that opening shot from the film most certainly established this point as perfectly as it was supposed to.
The Bourne film series can currently be streamed on Max, Hulu, and Netflix.
