Matt Damon and his disappearing acts
Matt Damon arrives for the "Elysium" Australian premiere at Event Cinemas George Street on August 12, 2013 in Sydney, Australia. Photo by Brendon Thorne/Getty Images
“There’s a great lesson here for an actor,” Matt Damon said, a dusting of gray in his short hair and thin goatee, fine age lines around his pale blue eyes. It was early May, and he was speaking via Zoom from a sparsely appointed, sun-splashed room in a rented house in Sydney, Australia, telling a story about working with Jack Nicholson on Martin Scorsese’s 2006 dirty-cops-and-criminals epic, The Departed.
“The scene was an eighth of a page,” Damon said, arching his eyebrows devilishly and adopting Jack’s insinuating vocal tones. He was recalling the older actor’s talking about reworking a scene in which his character, the Boston gangster Frank Costello, is supposed to murder a man in a marsh. “Jack looked at that scene” — and, truly, it was almost startling how well Damon captured Nicholson’s disquieting energy — “and he goes: ‘What I did was I made the person being executed a woman. That’s sinister. Costello executes a guy in a marsh? We’ve seen that kind of scene in movies before. That’s not what I did.’”
