Matt Damon is one of the biggest box offices to emerge from the 90s, bursting on the A-list for the first time with his role in Good Will Hunting 1997. However, aside from the 2019 Ford v Ferrari, it might happen to you that you haven't seen him in a lot of projects lately. Some bit roles, yes — most popular as Thor's pseudo-Loki melodramatic theater: Ragnarok — but not the huge, meaty lead roles that his red-carpet status typically gives him.
Damon's last lead role before Ford vs. Ferrari was the 2017 Coen Brothers Suburbicon movie, meaning he dipped off nearly three years of full-time projects.Hat's a long time to be not up front in the public eye; even high-profile stars may be subject to the impact of Hollywood's brief half-lives. Brad Pitt, Damon's contemporary A-list, confirmed he's gradually moving away from acting as he reaches his mid-50s; Is the same life cycle a part of Damon's future as well? Here's why in the last few years, you haven't seen Matt Damon in so many leading roles.
Matt Damon did a lot of behind the-scenes work
You may not have seen much of him, but Damon was extremely busy; in the past few years he has focused mostly on projects on the other side of the camera, usually as an executive producer. To him, this isn't something recent — he has EP credits that date back to 2002 — but the projects have definitely become bigger and higher in profile. "Executive producer" can mean many different things, but it still means a lot of effort, meetings, and processes of approval coming from the lower rungs of the food chain.
Damon also pivoted away from fiction in favor of documentaries; 2017 saw the release of Bending the Arc, a documentary film about the development of Partners In Health, a non-profit dedicated to the advancement of access to health care for the disadvantaged. He also has his hand in several third-world charity pies — including his own, Water.org, which is committed to ensuring reliable access to clean water across the world in the face of both poverty and climate. It's all all very much part of the Hollywood lifestyle, but not as public — and if you've existed as a sex symbol in the late 1990s and early '00s, you may like a little bit of privacy too.
Family death has caused Matt Damon to take some time off
A few years of declining public attention for Damon can also be explained by a personal event: the death of his father from cancer at the end of 2016. In an interview with The Talks Damon explained:
"I had done five movies in a row — The Martian, Jason Bourne, The Great Wall, Suburbicon and Downsizing all back to back — so I had promised my family I was going to take a year off, but then that year turned into a year in a hospital with my dad, which didn't feel a year off for anybody. So I took another year off after that. We really needed to do it, and it was a tough year."
After a rather hard career — including full-time foreign career on The Great Wall, which was a Chinese production — what should have been a easy, fast sabbatical turned into a challenging period that Damon needed to recover from everything else. Under those conditions no one should have to work and Damon is lucky in his good career to be able to take some time off with little effect, either financially or in terms of his public image.
Will Matt Damon ever return to big screen?
If you're concerned that this means that Damon will take a backseat in the movie world, don't worry. When asked by The Talks if he was considering giving up acting, his response was emphatic:
"No, I [will] still keep acting... ultimately, I love filmmaking because it speaks to that impulse that we have to tell stories to each other. It's a very human impulse that we have had since we were drawing pictures on cave walls, saying, 'Hey look, the buffalo almost got me. My friends and I got the buffalo instead. Can you relate to that?'"
In reality, Damon currently has a couple of movies in the works. His biggest new film, by far, reunites him for the first time in years with Ben Affleck onscreen. They have co-written and will co-star in the film The Last Duel, directed by Ridley Scott, a tale about a knight of the 14th century and his squire put at odds over sexual harassment charges against the wife of the knight. It'll have an initial limited release on Christmas 2020, with a larger release scheduled for January.
The other pending film is a drama called Stillwater, which stars Damon as an Oklahoman father who is forced to leave his oil rig job for France after his daughter is accused of murder; he will learn to expand his outlook on the world as he tries to help exonerate his child. The directing will be Tom McCarthy of Spotlight's fame, and Abigail Breslin. Zombieland: Double Tapwill portray Damon's strangled daughter. Filming wrapped up in 2019 and although the film is still in post-production it is expected to be released in 2020 at some point.
