The secrets behind Matt Damon's smile
Matt Damon does what few stars with his kind of billing do: he disappears. A character actor who rates multimillion-dollar paychecks, he has an Oscar, a lucrative blockbuster franchise, a wife you have probably never heard of and a résumé that includes Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Soderbergh. This autumn he stars in films from Martin Scorsese ("The Departed") and Robert De Niro ("The Good Shepherd"), for a reunion by proxy for the two directors. In the first Damon plays a gangster who goes under cover as a cop; in the second he plays a Yale graduate present at the birth of the CIA.
Damon tends to win respect, not swoons, from film critics, but great directors can't stay away. His boyish looks have certainly helped him land roles, and remain essential to his appeal even at 35. But it is his ability to recede into a film while also being fully present, a recessed intensity, that distinguishes how he holds the screen. When Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp, two other character actors masquerading as stars, take the screen, they tend to make noise. Their beauty creates its own distractions, and their forays into brooding intensity set off flares. Damon eases into roles so quietly you rarely see him acting.
It's the type of quiet that can be mistaken for no acting at all and that, much like his trademark smile, can prove deceptive. People magazine anointed him one of the sexiest men alive two years ago, but he seems out of place alongside the silky likes of Depp. With his heavy brow and a jaw that juts like a fist, Damon bears little resemblance to the delicate boy-men who have dominated Hollywood recently. He seems a little crude, almost brutal, as if he had been drawn for the Sunday comics. From some angles, with that stub of a nose and a flop of blond, he can look like Dennis the Menace. Cut the hair and he just looks like a menace.
It's this Janus-like quality - the boy next door who turns out to be the killer, the thief and the spy among us - that makes Damon a consistently surprising screen presence. Rooting around the clammy pathologies of a murderer like Tom Ripley, as he did in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999), might not have seemed the smartest move for a would-be star with heartthrob potential. Damon took on "Ripley" soon after "Good Will Hunting" (1997), a risky choice given how hard the director Anthony Minghella tried to pin Ripley's murderous tendencies on his homoerotic yearnings. With his blue eyes and sunburst smile Damon looked so pretty, so wholesome.
Ripley proved a smart move for a young actor who wanted to show bite as well as teeth. It also showed that Damon easily plays against type, as evident in his first important screen role, in "School Ties" (1992), as a prep school anti-Semite who makes life tough for the Jewish gridiron hero. That film didn't make Damon famous, but it helped make him hungry, and that hunger led to a partnership with his childhood friend Ben Affleck. They wrote "Good Will Hunting" to give themselves the kinds of roles they couldn't secure otherwise. (Damon went on to be nominated for best actor.) Damon played the title character, Will Hunting, a working-class genius from South Boston with issues. Affleck played his buddy, the guy who isn't the genius.
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High-end careers like Damon's are made on talent, luck, timing, contacts and the camera's love, but anyone who retains director approval on a film green-lighted by Harvey Weinstein is no fool. Damon made his share of clunkers with Miramax but he also made the most of his tenure. Films like "Dogma," one of four films Damon made with Kevin Smith, solidified his indie cred.
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