When Matt Damon made his big-screen breakthrough with the role he'd penned for himself (along with lifelong friend Ben Affleck) in Good Will Hunting, few would have guessed that the scrawny kid with the apple-pie looks would go on to become one of the biggest action stars of the 21st century.
Damon was the golden boy -- a youthful, all-American type seemingly best suited to romantic leads and light comedic roles, with the occasional indie turn as a brainy, troubled misfit sprinkled in for variety. In a way, though, the changing economics of the motion picture business forced his hand. An earlier generation of Robert Redfords and Dustin Hoffmans could carve out nice careers for themselves without bruising their knuckles on hard-hitting action fare, but Hollywood's blockbuster mentality makes it much more difficult for an actor to sustain movie stardom without the occasional high-octane shootout or death-defying car chase.
So while his casting in the first of the Jason Bourne movies, 2002's The Bourne Identity, raised a few eyebrows at the time, Damon quickly established that he could kick butt and take names with the best of them, without losing the relatable quality that he brought to films like Hunting and Saving Private Ryan.
He's the action-hero-next-door; your grandmother may love him, but he's still credible enough with the hard-core crowd to win testosterone-soaked Spike TV's 2008 Guy's Choice Award for "Best Ass-Kicker." Now that Damon has re-teamed with two-time "Bourne" director Paul Greengrass for the Iraq war thriller Green Zone, let's take a closer look at the five types of action roles this unlikely contender has pulled off to date.
In some ways, Green Zone represents a return to familiar territory for Damon, who played a veteran of the first Persian Gulf conflict in 1996's Courage Under Fire, as well as the all-American title character in Saving Private Ryan.
Neither of those films really allowed him to strut his stuff, however; in Courage, his Specialist Ilario was an emaciated heroin addict (Damon lost 40 pounds for the role), and his role in Ryan was a generally passive one (he was the guy who needed saving, after all).
Although Green Zone is loosely based on a nonfiction account by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Damon's Army officer Roy Miller is a fictionalization -- and an awfully Bourne-esque one, judging from the car chases, gunbattles and explosive fireballs on display in the movie trailer. Iraq films have been a tough sell at the box office, but if anyone can reverse that trend, it just may be the man whom Entertainment Weekly declared "the decade's best mixer of brawn and brains."
Any actor seeking a fruitful action-movie career needs a durable franchise character to serve as a sort of home base and help establish his bona fides with an audience. Clint Eastwood had Dirty Harry, Sylvester Stallone is still milking Rocky and Rambo for all they're worth, and Harrison Ford may never hang up his Indiana Jones fedora for good.
It's not as easy as it looks; just ask Damon's best pal Affleck, whose attempt at taking over the Jack Ryan franchise began and ended with 2002's disappointing The Sum of All Fears. The character of Jason Bourne proved a savvy choice as Damon's entrée into the action realm, not only because Bourne is a more cerebral hero than most, but because he enters the story as an amnesiac -- a seemingly regular Joe who only gradually discovers his CIA-supplied ninja skills.
By the end of The Bourne Identity, we've grown to accept Damon as Robert Ludlum's iconic superspy, and we're ready to follow him into sequel-land. Of course, teaming up with the right creative talent helps, and the actor was lucky enough to have sure-handed directors Doug Liman (on Identity) and Greengrass (on Supremacy and Ultimatum) to put him through his paces.
Timing doesn't hurt, either. Arriving as it did in 2002, the first "Bourne" film established a paranoid post-9-11 mood and a breathless, jittery style of action filmmaking that would influence even the venerable James Bond series.
In one of his earliest films, 1998's Rounders, Damon played the world's most wholesome poker shark, and the following year saw him starring as one of literature's great con artists in The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith.
Damon was not entirely convincing as the devilish Ripley, but Steven Soderbergh must have seen something in his performance to suggest he had a hint of the grifter in him. As pickpocket Linus Caldwell in Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven and its two sequels, Damon is more adept at sleight-of-hand than fisticuffs, but it's an important role in his development as an action star; all the greats have at least one "guys on a mission" movie (a la The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen) on their résumés.
Golfers might argue that Damon made his mark as an athletic man of action in 2000's The Legend of Bagger Vance, but those of us who have trouble acknowledging golf as a sport lean toward last year's Invictus. It's true that Damon is somewhat lacking in stature when compared to the real-life captain of South Africa's Springboks rugby team Francois Pienaar (whom he portrays in Clint Eastwood's Nelson Mandela biopic), but he did bulk up impressively enough to pass for a convincing footballer. (The physical transformation is even more startling when you consider that Damon packed on more than 30 pounds of flab for his portrayal of whistleblower Mark Whitacre in The Informant!, released only a few months before Invictus.) The academy obviously agrees, as it rewarded Damon with an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Damon returned to his Boston roots for his role in Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning crime saga The Departed, and in doing so proved equally adept at portraying the dark side of the man of action. His state police officer Colin Sullivan is secretly an inside man in the employ of Jack Nicholson's mob boss, and Damon uses his clean-cut looks and boy-next-door charm to his advantage in suggesting a villain supremely skilled at passing for the good guy. He reveals a ruthless knack for self-preservation, however, first when pursued in a street chase by Leonardo DiCaprio's undercover cop (a chase that ends with Sullivan stabbing an innocent man), and later when he learns that Nicholson's crime lord is an FBI informant.
