Matt Damon on acting the part

THE life of a Hollywood A-lister isn’t all glitz and glamour.

While making his latest film, the sci-fi action picture Elysium, Matt Damon had to work in an environment known as ‘poo river’.

He also shot a scene that was so tough one of his co-stars went down with pneumonia. Oh, and the training regime he undertook for the role made him “really, really grouchy for six months”.

The movie responsible for all this upheaval is the second feature from writer-director Neill Blomkamp — who announced his arrival as an exciting new filmmaker with the 2009 sci-fi hit District 9 — and he shot large portions of Elysium on a notorious, sprawling rubbish dump in Mexico City.

“We specifically looked for some of the worst areas in the city,” explains Blomkamp. “When you drive in there before dawn it smells terrible; something about the sun coming up burns this layer of humidity out of the sewerage.

“There was one location that we called ‘Poo River’,” he adds. “We had a helicopter for the aerial shots and I’m shouting at the pilot, ‘Go lower, go lower,’ and I just hit Matt with a wall of dust! I thought it was a stunt guy, but the team were like, ‘No, it’s Matt.”

Damon grimaces at the memory. “That dust is actually comprised largely of faecal matter,” says the actor, “and so, at the end of every day, as we’d wipe this stuff off, we would have these shitty towels!

“But, in actual fact, that wasn’t the hardest part of the shoot,” continues Damon. “The toughest stuff was a scene in a giant wind tunnel, where we were soaking wet and it was freezing cold.”

In fact, conditions we so severe, Brazilian actor Wagner Moura caught pneumonia. “And he is a tough guy,” Damon notes.

“I saw him and he was green and I said, ‘Are you all right, man?’ And he looked down and he looked up and he said, ‘I am not well.’”

The film is set in the middle of next century, in a world that is drained of natural resources. The very rich, meanwhile, live in an idyllic space station that orbits the earth, lengthening their lives with miraculous treatments. Damon’s character, Max, takes on the task (albeit reluctantly) of redressing the social inequality.

“My character’s bald and he has big muscles and tattoos everywhere. Neill, the director, had drawn pictures of him and they hired a trainer for me so I went to the guy, showed him that picture and went, ‘Do that!’”

The time spent in the gym, Damon says, was enjoyable. “When do you get to indulge like that? Nobody spends four hours a day in the gym, unless you are an athlete, but I was there three to four hours every day.

“It was weightlifting in the morning and then a little bodybuilding and sprinting and cardio in the afternoon. It was a lot, I mean, way too much and then the big thing is what you eat.”

The time spent dieting, Damon concedes, was much less enjoyable. He is a self-confessed “foodie.”

He says, “I love to drink wine and eat pasta, so without all that I was really grouchy, really, really grouchy for six months. I love Italian food, I love the pizzas and the pastas and it’s hard having kids too, because you are feeding them all the food and it’s total f—king torture. I love all that kid food, the chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese.”

Damon has four daughters, three of whom he has had with his wife, Lucy Barroso (the eldest, Alexia, is Barroso’s from an earlier relationship). The couple married at a small ceremony in 2005, after meeting in the bar where she worked while he was shooting the Farrelly brother’s conjoined twin comedy Stuck on You in Miami, Florida.

The couple, who renewed their vows this April, share parenting duties, even when Damon is working. “I remember when I was shooting The Bourne Ultimatum being in London and Lucy excused me from diaper changes in the middle of the night,” he recalls.

“She said, ‘I’ll do them because you have to get at least five or six hours uninterrupted sleep,’ because the days were so long. But we are good at travelling. We have done so much at this point. We are very used to getting to new places and setting up camp that as long as we are all together everything is normal for the kids.”

Damon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just north of Boson, breaking through with childhood friend Ben Affleck with their Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting. His and Affleck’s careers then took different routes, Damon building up an impressive film CV, working with the very best directors, even before the Bourne films catapulted him to stardom.

Affleck, meanwhile, embraced big-budget, big-paycheque pictures, like the critical misfires Pearl Harbor and Gigli, and struck up a relationship with his co-star in the latter, Jennifer Lopez, inviting the unpleasant moniker Bennifer.

He also gambled heavily and was regularly criticised in the press. Only now, on the back of his third feature film as a director, the Oscar-winner Argo, is Affleck a critical darling once more.

“I was so happy for him and relieved,” says Damon of his friend’s success at this year’s Academy Awards.

“I also was happy for me because I don’t have to defend him any more. I was on an island for a while.

“It is a really frustrating thing to know how talented someone is and to put up with some of the stuff I read about him in the press. He took it better than I could imagine anybody taking it.

“I think the people who love him felt more anger and frustration for him than we thought that he was feeling. But in getting that award it opened it up to him how much it all really did hurt him all those years, being the butt of the jokes. That has all gone now.”

The friends’ joy at Affleck’s win has been tempered this year, however, by the tragedy that unfolded at the marathon in Boston, the town where Damon and Affleck spent so much of their time as children.

“It’s heartbreaking,” he says of the tragedy. “And the idea that this kid was in our community and was in our school, and lived on Norfolk Street, next to my teacher, it’s insane.

“It was not as if some Al Queda guy flew in and didn’t know anything about Boston — which would be bad enough — but a member of the community, doing this to his own community? It’s impossible to understand.”

Does he worry about raising daughters in the current world climate? “I do worry but then you have to go ‘F—k it,’ and just get on with life. But having girls, I think I do the same with them as I would do with sons,” he says.

“I just give them a foundation of stability and love, so that they feel comfortable and secure and feel like they have a voice. But I do think that I will be eventually sending them into a world that is not as fair to women as men.”