When it came to casting his latest film, Invictus, Clint Eastwood couldn't have asked for a better actor than Matt Damon to play good guy Francois Pienaar, the South African national rugby union team captain who led his side to a surprise and very significant victory against New Zealand on the 24th June 1995.
Because, you know, everyone loves Matt Damon. Even those South Park pranksters.
It-had been Nelson Mandela's stated intention immediately upon his election as the first president of post-apartheid South Africa to use the Springboks as a springboard for uniting his country. Taking on the task of uniting blacks (who generally preferred soccer) and whites behind their national rugby team forms the basis for Eastwood's film, itself based upon John Carlin's 2008 book Playing The Enemy: Nelson Mandela And The Game That Changed A Nation. Naturally, Morgan Freeman plays Mandela.
"But of course," smiles Damon. "It's hard to imagine anyone else really, given this wonderful, effortless gravitas both these men have. It was easy to imagine what it would be like, meeting Mandela, when you're faced with Morgan Freeman. He really should consider running for office..."
In the meantime, Freeman's busying himself with earnest little movies like Invictus, yet another of those low-budget Clint Eastwood dramas that's low on hi-tech wizardy and high on sentimentality and the performance. Freeman popped up in 2004's Million Dollar Baby for Eastwood too, having worked with him before, twelve years earlier, on Unforgiven.
"It's something I'd been observing with a lot of Clint's recent films," nods Damon. "Stuff like Mystic River, Million Dollar, The Changeling. People within the industry would talk with almost hushed reverence about how the guy would just do one or two takes - usually one - and then move on. No fuss, no long blank stares into the middle distance, no chewing it over during lunch. You just set up the camera, did the scene, and moved on.
"It's a wonderful way to work, because it just keeps you on your toes. You knew you weren't necessarily going to get another chance to get it right, and so, you know, you got it right. Or, at least, you tried."
Matt Damon's been getting it largely right - or, at least, trying to - for 22 years now, ever since he got his first line of dialogue - just the one - on the big screen, in 1988's Mystic Pizza. A few years later, he popped up on Hollywood's radar for losing 40 pounds in 100 days for a 2-day shoot on 1996's Courage Under Fire. It was a movie that didn't deserve such devotion, but, as Damon went onto medication to repair the damage to his body, he was glad to have taking such a plunge. Damon knew such a role might just get him noticed, and it did.
The following year, he was leading Coppola's The Rainmaker, and had the green light for a script that he'd written with his longtime Boston buddy, Ben Affleck. Directed by Gus van Zant, Good Will Hunting changed everything, Damon getting an Oscar nod for Best Actor in the lead role, and winning alongside Affleck for Best Original Screenplay. Robin Williams picked up a gong too, ensuring that Good Will Hunting was the Hollywood fairytale of 1997.
The only way is up, up and away. Right?
"Looking back, I don't think that we did anything wrong," says Damon about he and Affleck's immediate post-Oscar glory career, which proved decidedly choppy. "We were young, and ready to try everything. We were movie nuts, so, being allowed inside the circle, and being given the chance to actually make movies that would be released around the world, that was dizzying.
"It's also something of a crapshoot, something we'd both been aware of, having followed a thousand careers through their ups and downs, through their downfalls and their comebacks. You can't really plan a perfect career; you can only be as smart as you can about the films you say yes to. And if one fails, you really just have to move on to the next one. And the next one."
Until?
"Well, until there isn't a next one," deadpans Damon. "Then, you've got to start planning your spectacular comeback. With a low-budget sensation. That usually works."
Luckily for Damon, it's never gotten quite that bad. In the aftermath of Good Will Hunting, there was Saving Private Ryan, Rounders, Dogma, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and then... well, then along came The Legend Of Baggar Vance and All The Pretty Horses. Both looked unstoppable on paper - the former co-starred box-office champ Will Smith; the latter was critics fave Billy Bob Thornton taking on a Cormac McCarthy classic. Both released in 2000, their complete and utter failure at the box-office was a low blow for Damon. It was a feeling he'd return to in 2003, with the Farrelly brothers' deeply unfunny Stuck On You, and again in 2005, with Terry Gilliam's utterly uncharming gothic fairytale, The Brothers Grimm.
"There's definitely been times when I thought, okay, the jig is up," says Damon. "I'm going to have to take a few steps back and start all over again. Ben and I both have had those feelings, and I know Ben now feels his career is in a different place than it was five, ten years ago. He's no longer in the franchise game. I think it was the franchises - not so much the Ocean's movies, which really aren't mine, but the Bourne outings - that saved me.
"I'm sure Hollywood would have just written me off as a weirdo liberal, given the arthouse movies I've made along the way, if the Bourne movies hadn't made such a phenomenal amount of money.
"I owe a lot to Jason Bourne..."
And now, Matt may be saying goodbye to all that. The man who steered the second and third installments of the three Bourne movies, Paul Greengrass, announced in December that he wouldn't be back for the fourth. He and Damon had just completed work on Green Zone (due out in March), a movie described by some as 'Bourne in Iraq'. Damon himself won't comment on whether he's signing up for that fourth Bourne installment or not.
"Paul's a director that I'd follow to the ends of the earth," is all he'll say, "and it'd be tough to go ahead on this journey without him. I'm going to have to talk with him, and others, further before I make up my mind on that front."
In the meantime, Damon has plenty of other movies to keep him busy. Plenty.
Having taken a breather after landing two nominations at the recent Golden Globes - garnering nods in two different acting categories, for Invictus and the Steven Soderbergh-directed The Informant! - there's a reunion with Affleck planned alongside the Kenneth Lonergan drama Margaret, The Adjustment Bureau with Emily Blunt, a reunion with Eastwood for the supernatural thriller Hereafter (currently filming) and Happy Feet 2 In 3D (also filming). The most exciting of the bunch looks like the planned remake of the John Wayne classic, True Grit, alongside Jeff Bridges, with the Coen brothers directing.
"Hey, what can I say," smiles Damon, "it's a good time to be alive."
And after all the ups and downs, is Matt Damon happy? Or is there always a niggling doubt that it could all end tomorrow?
"I think I am happy," he finishes. "I don't worry the way I would have starting out, because I know a lot of the work I've done will stand to me. I'm not living by the box-office, and therefore I don't feel the pressure to deliver traditional hits all the time. I realise there's a business side to this, and I'm certainly keen for these movies to find an audience, but it's far more satisfying when those movies you're promoting are movies you'd happily go and see yourself.
"I think that's the key to it. Don't make movies you yourself wouldn't want to watch..."
Words - Paul Byrne
Invictus is now showing in Irish cinemas nationwide
Green Zone opens in Irish cinemas in March 2010