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Mon 17 August 2026 19:15, UK
It’s not out of the ordinary for an actor to look towards one of their peers or predecessors as the blueprint they want to emulate in their career, but Matt Damon took things at least one step further.
Instead of picking out a particular performer to model his trajectory on, he focused on a minor character from a classic 1968 movie who only had a handful of lines. In microcosm, it’s a weird way to establish the goals you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to achieve, but looking back, it makes much more sense.
Even though he didn’t really want to be a movie star, that was more Ben Affleck’s thing, until he almost ruined himself in the early 2000s, Damon became one anyway, which he managed by playing major roles in a string of great films, many of which were helmed by some of cinema’s greatest directors.
It wasn’t until The Bourne Identity that he broke through as a bankable leading man, but even then, he was convinced the spy thriller would have the opposite effect. Plagued by reshoots and poor test screenings, he genuinely thought his days as a mainstream concern were numbered, only to be proven wrong in the best way possible.
These days, Damon is leading billion-dollar blockbusters like The Odyssey, headlining box office and awards season favourites like The Martian, and lending support in the auteur-driven likes of Oppenheimer and The Last Duel, while still finding the time to make gratuitous cameos in flicks made by his friends.
He’s found himself the best of every possible filmic world, and when he was offered the chance to play ‘The Kid’ in Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead, he turned down the most money he’d ever been offered for a role in his fledgling professional life, and he used a minor movie character to justify his reasons.
“You know what I did last night? I watched Bullitt,” the Academy Award-winning screenwriter recalled telling his agents, before getting to the point. “Robert Duvall drives a cab in that movie, and he has, like, four lines, but he was totally believable, and he was really good, and at the end of the day, he was in Bullitt: he’s in all these great movies because he doesn’t do this kind of thing.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
That wouldn’t be the first or last time that he called the late, great Duvall the guy he always wanted to be like, but it was the only time he specifically singled out his minor contributions to the Steve McQueen-led action thriller as the driving force behind rejecting the parts that could have sent his career spinning off in a direction that he never wanted it to go.
You can see exactly how it’s informed his decision-making ever since, and if Duvall hadn’t made such a memorable impression with his scant amount of screentime in Bullitt, who knows where Damon might have ended up instead?
