{"id":741679,"date":"2026-08-18T08:44:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T08:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/741679\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T08:44:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T08:44:18","slug":"the-minor-1968-movie-character-matt-damon-based-his-entire-career-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/741679\/","title":{"rendered":"The minor 1968 movie character Matt Damon based his entire career on"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Matt<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n

Mon 17 August 2026 19:15, UK <\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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<\/a> took things at least one step further.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a weird way to establish the goals you\u2019ll spend the rest of your life trying to achieve, but looking back, it makes much more sense.<\/p>\n

Even though he didn\u2019t really want to be a movie star, that was more Ben Affleck\u2019s thing<\/a>, 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\u2019s greatest directors.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t 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<\/a>, only to be proven wrong in the best way possible.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s found himself the best of every possible filmic world, and when he was offered the chance to play \u2018The Kid\u2019 in Sam Raimi\u2019s The Quick and the Dead, he turned down the most money he\u2019d ever been offered<\/a> for a role in his fledgling professional life, and he used a minor movie character to justify his reasons.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know what I did last night? I watched Bullitt,\u201d the Academy Award-winning screenwriter recalled telling his agents, before getting to the point. \u201cRobert 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\u2019s in all these great movies because he doesn\u2019t do this kind of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further reading: Cutting Room Floor<\/p>\n

That wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

You can see exactly how it\u2019s informed his decision-making ever since<\/a>, and if Duvall hadn\u2019t made such a memorable impression with his scant amount of screentime in Bullitt, who knows where Damon might have ended up instead?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still Mon 17 August 2026 19:15, UK It\u2019s not out of the ordinary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370284,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[19405,137400,27787,245324,6491,96,2828,90034,177960,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-741679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-1960s","tag-137400","tag-action-movies","tag-bullitt","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-matt-damon","tag-robert-duvall","tag-thriller-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=741679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}