Matt Damon is among the most talented action stars in Hollywood. His latest film, Oppenheimer, earned him massive appreciation from critics and viewers. The actor has given numerous iconic roles in his career, with films like The Bourne Identity, Ford v Ferrari, Saving Private Ryan, The Departed, and others. He was initially keen on working in Gregory Hoblit’s Primal Fear, however, it would have eliminated the opportunity to work in an Oscar-winning film.
Damon wanted to play the lead role in Hoblit’s film, however, rejection from the film changed his life and made him a star.
Matt Damon was rejected from Gregory Hoblit’s Primal Fear
The Martian actor was among the numerous actors who wanted to make their career by getting the lead role in Gregory Hoblit’s film. The role of Aaron Stampler was widely seen as a career-boosting part and numerous actors were pursuing it. Damon had earlier missed his chance in Dead Poet’s Society (1989), hence he was desperate for the role. However, he was rejected again for the part.
Damon had also done some preparation for the film, in case he was selected. He shared on The Off Camera Show,
“It’s like when Primal Fear came along, and everyone knew. I literally spent money — on a dialect coach — that I didn’t have. Because there were two different dialects in the movie and I was like, ‘I gotta work on this,’ because it was clear that whoever got that role was gonna blow up.”
The role eventually went to Edward Norton. The young actors, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck realized that there were low chances of getting another great part, which gets rejected by known actors and tossed to newcomers. Hence, they had to do something to kickstart their career. They brainstormed and came up with the story of the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting, which made them overnight stars.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Good Will Hunting started as a college project
The Adjustment Bureau actor and Batman star Ben Affleck wrote the screenplay of Good Will Hunting when they were young actors. Damon was in the fifth year of Harvard University and attended a playwriting class. He shared about writing the screenplay in his class. Damon shared with Boston Magazine,
“There was this playwriting class, and the culmination of it was to write a one-act play, and I just started writing a movie. So I handed the professor at the end of the semester, a 40-odd page document, and said, ‘Look, I might have failed your class, but it is the first act of something longer.’”
He asked Ben Affleck to perform the scenes with him in front of the class. Later, Damon moved into Affleck’s Los Angeles apartment, and they began working on the script more seriously.
Affleck shared in the interview,
“We came up with this idea of the brilliant kid and his townie friends, where he was special, and the government wanted to get their mitts on him. And it had a very Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run sensibility, where the kids from Boston were giving the NSA the slip all the time. We would improvise and drink like six or twelve beers or whatever and record it with a tape recorder. At the time we imagined the professor and the shrink would be Morgan Freeman and De Niro, so we’d do our imitations of Freeman and De Niro. It was kind of hopelessly naïve and probably really embarrassing in that respect.”
Good Will Hunting was released in 1997, and it grossed $225 million worldwide against a $10 million budget. It is available for streaming on Max.
Source- Boston Magazine, The Off Camera Show
