I'm ducking Matt Damon. We're supposed to meet at the Central Park Zoo ticket booth precisely at noon, but I'm not there. I'm thirty feet away, standing behind a huge oak tree, keeping watch.
Cameron Crowe, the director, has urged me to try to get a glimpse of the 41-year-old actor when he doesn't know I'm there. "Matt's fans relate to him as an older brother or a member of the family. And that's how he relates to them," Crowe says, recalling how during the shoot of their new movie, We Bought a Zoo, he liked to do reconnaissance on Damon as he signed autographs and interacted with his public.
The Boston native, who now calls New York home, can be reticent in interviews, reluctant to reveal too much or get too personal. I want to observe him in his natural habitat, and I imagine that my stealth will be rewarded with the kind of unguarded moment that can only be viewed in the wild. As minutes pass, however, and I don't spot him anywhere, a thought looms: This is Jason Bourne I'm hunting—the master of evasion. What if Matt Damon is ducking me?
Stepping into the open, I sort of wave my notebook like a journalistic homing beacon, and suddenly there he is, all smiles. "Hi, I'm Matt," he says, extending a hand. He's in jeans, a gray waffle-y long-sleeve T-shirt, and what look to be brand-new black Puma sneakers. He has a knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows, which makes it easy to notice that his hat and his eyes are exactly the same blue. He's taller than I thought he'd be and exactly a quarter inch taller than the man standing next to him: a gray-haired, bespectacled guy in pleated chinos and a baseball cap.
"This," Damon proclaims, "is my dad."
When Damon the younger pulls out a credit card to gain us entry to what we will all agree must be the smallest zoo on earth, Damon the elder (his name is Kent) observes wryly, "This is the first time the son buys the father a ticket to the zoo. When has that happened before?" Whereupon the son grins big and says, "There's, like, a disturbance in the Force!"
"Come on," Kent says. "Let's go see the polar bears."
As we set off, I'm immediately struck by the constant cross-generational ball-busting between father and son. For example, the story of when 12-year-old Matt announced his intent to play point guard for the Boston Celtics.
I mention something Crowe has told me about Damon's performance in the new film, in which he plays a widowed father of two who buys a ramshackle zoo. Crowe singles out a scene in which Damon talks to an ailing Siberian tiger through a chain-link fence. In the script, the tiger was supposed to be supine, but the minute Damon delivered his first line, the cat got up, snarling, and came toward him with menace. "Most people would have said, 'This isn't funny—put a chain on that thing!' But Matt stays in," Crowe told me, explaining why that first, unexpected take is the one he used in the final film. "You see him flinch but stay in."
Hearing this, Kent gets a mischievous look: "So you were brave?"
Matt shakes his head and rolls his eyes. "Cameron was telling stories about how I was brave in the face of a caged tiger," he says. "He was working it."
"Bunch of b.s.," agrees Kent. Which is when I realize that we may still be talking about who's the bigger man. Standing in front of a 90,000-gallon tank containing Gus, the zoo's half-ton polar bear, Matt describes borrowing a bike from his elder brother, Kyle, and discovering (when he couldn't reach the pedals) that Kyle has much longer legs. "We realized if you took his lower body and my upper body, we'd be, like, six foot three," Matt tells his dad, who readily concedes that Matt is long of torso. "You have a neck," he tells his son. "I don't even have a neck." At which point, Matt nods and says simply, "It's true." If you measured the smirks on their faces, I swear they'd be precisely the same size.
···
When I tell the director Steven Soderbergh that I'm writing this piece about Damon, he responds with faux derision: "Why? He's not doing much." (Damon was in five movies released in 2011, and he's appeared in more than thirty-five films since his breakout role as an emaciated addict in 1996's Courage Under Fire.) Soderbergh has directed his friend in six of those—Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen; Che: Part Two; The Informant!; and Contagion—and most recently has cast him as Liberace's lover in an HBO biopic slated to shoot later this year. He calls Damon "probably the least vain person in his position"—meaning movie star—"out there. He has no interest in protecting any sort of idea of himself as an actor."
What he does have, however, is an interest in using his power as an actor to champion the underdog and right what he perceives to be wrong. He has thrown his full weight (and his money) behind a charity, Water.org, that seeks to provide sources of clean water to the Third World. Over the years, he has spoken up about public-school teachers (he supports them), the middle class (he thinks they're getting the shaft), and President Obama (he feels he's not delivering on his promise). At the White House Correspondents' dinner this year, Obama responded directly, saying, "Matt Damon said he was disappointed in my performance. Well, Matt, I just saw The Adjustment Bureau..."
Damon tells me he didn't see that speech live but got thirty e-mails from friends the next morning and watched the president's remarks online. "I have to say, it was pretty funny," he says, getting in his own dig: "Whoever came up with it, it was a terrific joke."
Recently the director Michael Moore called on Damon to run for president, which he says he will never, ever do. Which may be for the best, given how explicitly he pokes fun at his own image. In appearances on late-night TV and on shows like Entourage, he seems to relish being pompous, arrogant, goofy, even profane. Tina Fey says he approached her at an awards dinner and said he'd like to be considered for a cameo on 30 Rock. ("We don't let people slide," she says, "once they make a mistake like that.") Whether impersonating his pal Matthew McConaughey for David Letterman ("In today's scene, I think it would be a good opportunity for me to take my shirt off....") or pretending to be screwing Sarah Silverman on her then boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel's show (On the bed, on the floor, on a towel, by the door, in the tub, in the car, up against the minibar!), he seems to have an intuitive feel for comedy.
"A lot of stars/serious actors try to put some weird 'comedy sauce' on their acting. Matt doesn't put anything on it. He says the lines honestly," says Silverman, whose Emmy-winning music video, "I'm Fucking Matt Damon," nearly melted the Internet after it aired on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2008. Whether it's comedy or drama, she adds, "he has that Meryl Streep thing where he always blows your mind, and you just want to watch him and watch him. He doesn't need a fancy accent or a fake tooth to play a 'regular person.' He just eats normal and gets a not-expensive haircut."
···
Scott Rudin, the ber-producer who worked with Damon on the Coen brothers' True Grit, says he's been a "crazy stalker fan" since he read Good Will Hunting fifteen years ago. And Rudin's regard for Damon has only grown, he says, as he's watched the actor carve his own path through Hollywood.
"He's done such great things with his stardom," Rudin says, recalling how Damon turned his nonleading role in True Grit—the buffoon with a romantic streak, LaBoeuf—into "the beating heart of the movie." There's something about Damon—a melding of his talent and his public persona—that gives him a "compact with the audience," Rudin says. "And he retains it, whether every movie works or doesn't."
With the Bourne franchise, which has earned more than $1 billion worldwide, he has proved his box-office clout. And then he turned his back on it, at least temporarily. What other A-lister would have walked away from the fourth Bourne film (and an estimated $20 million payday) because, he says, he and director Paul Greengrass felt that the tight timetable set by the studio would endanger its chances of being good? "That's a pretty striking move," Rudin says.
Damon says they had no choice. "If you look at the first three movies, we kind of pounded that idea of identity and amnesia into the ground. We really got everything out of it that we could. So to reboot it, we need to come up with something completely new," he says, explaining why the eleven-month turnaround that Universal Pictures wanted didn't feel doable.
Another Bourne film is in the works, however. Tony Gilroy, who wrote or co-wrote the first three films, has written and begun directing the fourth, The Bourne Legacy. The movie is said to exist in the same world as the previous three, but it introduces a new main character, played by Jeremy Renner. Damon says he learned about the project one day while surfing online. "It was a surprise," he says, though he doesn't sound particularly miffed. Not yet, at least.
Damon tells me he thinks Gilroy is a great director (Michael Clayton, Duplicity) and that he admires Renner. And because Damon fully intends to make another Bourne movie someday, he says he's "really pulling for this one, even though I don't have anything to do with it. Selfishly, it's bad for me if that movie doesn't do well." He says he still feels "inoculated" by the franchise—as if it protects him from having to do anything that could be bad for him. "It feels like I can swing freely, like a baseball player—just be relad and really do the things that I want to do and not worry, because I know there's another one out there."
Later, though, Damon will wonder if maybe he has become a little too relad. Because suddenly, as we sit on a bench in the afternoon sunshine, he takes a major swing at Gilroy. Damon says that back in 2001, when the first Bourne movie, The Bourne Identity, was still in postproduction, Gilroy saw a rough cut and got worried. "The word on Bourne was that it was supposed to be a turkey," Damon says. "It's very rare that a movie comes out a year late, has four rounds of reshoots, and it's good. So Tony Gilroy arbitrated against himself to not be the writer with sole credit."
Typically screenwriters use the Writers Guild's arbitration process when they feel they've been denied credit unfairly. This time, Gilroy wanted to share the credit (and the blame), Damon says, "to have another guy take the bullet with him." And so someone named William Blake Herron is now cashing residual checks on Bourne, just like Gilroy is. (Actually Damon may have gotten his chronology wrong—one source says Herron initiated the credit dispute, but that Gilroy didn't oppose sharing credit.)
Gilroy wrote Bourne 2 as well: The Bourne Supremacy. Then, Damon says, for The Bourne Ultimatum, the third in the franchise, Gilroy struck a deal to write just one draft of the script, take no notes, do no rewrites, and get paid "an exorbitant amount of money."
"It's really the studio's fault for putting themselves in that position," Damon says. "I don't blame Tony for taking a boatload of money and handing in what he handed in. It's just that it was unreadable. This is a career-ender. I mean, I could put this thing up on eBay and it would be game over for that dude. It's terrible. It's really embarrassing. He was having a go, basically, and he took his money and left."
Gilroy's lackluster work left the production in chaos, Damon says. "We had a start date. Like, 'It's coming out August of next year.' We're like, 'Hang on, we've got to figure out what the script is.' " In the end, the shooting script was written under extreme deadline pressure by George Nolfi and Scott Z. Burns, with input from Greengrass, Damon says. And then Gilroy raised another challenge. "Before the movie came out, he arbitrated to get sole credit," Damon says, disgusted. The WGA looked into it and turned Gilroy down. (He shares credit with Nolfi and Burns.) "That was just a little bit of justice, I have to say," Damon says.
A representative for Gilroy referred all inquiries to Universal Pictures, where spokeswoman Kori Bernards reiterated the studio's support for both Damon and Gilroy. "We could not imagine replacing Matt as Jason Bourne, which is why we're so excited Tony's script creates a fantastic new character in The Bourne Legacy and also leaves open the option for Matt to return.... Tony has done everything we've asked of him on each of the Bourne films, and his work has been a huge asset to the franchise."
···
"Are you spying on me?" Damon says into his cell phone, which has just vibrated in his pocket. He's talking to his wife, Lucy, and he's also looking right at her. The petite, dark-eyed beauty is standing forty feet away, on the other side of a low fence.
"Do you want to see a polar bear?" he asks Lucy, his voice playful and delighted and warm as melted butter. (If he bottled that voice, lots of women would pay thousands of dollars an ounce and pour it all over themselves.) But Lucy isn't budging. Damon turns to his dad and me: "She says, 'I've already done the zoo.' "
They met in 2003 in Miami, where Damon was shooting the Farrelly brothers comedy Stuck on You, in which he and Greg Kinnear played conjoined twins. The movie was a god-awful flop, but boy, was there an upside: Luciana Bozan, an Argentine-born bartender with a 6-year-old daughter named Alexia. Once they met, Damon—who'd been romantically linked to actresses like Minnie Driver and Winona Ryder— was done looking. They married in a civil ceremony in 2005 and promptly (very promptly: Lucy was pregnant when they wed) had three more girls of their own: Isabella, now 5, Gia, 3, and Stella, 1.
Meanwhile Damon and Ben Affleck, the man he calls his "hetero lifemate," remain as tight as ever. The two have a production company, Pearl Street Films, and Damon lets slip that they are developing a biopic about James "Whitey" Bulger, the onetime godfather of the Irish Mob in Boston, who was on the lam for sixteen years before being apprehended last June. Damon will play Bulger and Affleck will direct. But that won't be for a while yet. First Damon must finish Elysium, a sci-fi picture directed by Neill Blomkamp, who made the acclaimed District 9.
Then Damon will direct himself. Beginning sometime in early 2012, he is going into preproduction on an as-yet-untitled movie he's writing with John Krasinski, of The Office. They met and hit it off when Damon did The Adjustment Bureau with Krasinski's wife, Emily Blunt. Krasinski shared his script idea—about a salesman (Damon) who visits a small town and experiences something that changes his life—and the two started working together on the weekends while Damon was shooting We Bought a Zoo.
"I just found writing with him really easy—like writing with Ben," Damon says. We've stepped briefly into the penguin house, which smelled like you'd expect a place filled with the excrement of sixty-five large birds would. ("The penguins were great, by the way," Damon said as we fled. "Thank you for that.") Now we've detoured past the red panda toward an enclosure that houses three snow leopards. As we wander, I'm struck that Damon appears to approach this major career shift much like he seems to do everything else: without much apparent angst.
To be sure, he is thinking a lot about how to apply the lessons he's learned during the two decades he's closely observed almost every great director alive—in addition to the ones we've already mentioned, he's also worked with Eastwood, Redford, Scorsese, Gilliam, and Van Sant. DeNiro and Affleck have advised him, he says, on the challenges of directing and acting at the same time. Damon's not naive: He knows that if he sucks as a director, it will be a very public failure. "There are just too many decisions over the course of too long a time, and if you're not a truly great director, you just can't hide," he says.
So why do it? "When I first started getting work, I felt like acting was the most important thing," he says. "But the more you do it, the more you realize that in the end, the director has all the power.
"Clint says all the time, 'Let's not fuck this up too much by thinking about it,' " he says, referring to Eastwood, with whom he's done two films, one of which (Invictus) got Damon an Oscar nomination. "That's his approach, and some people love it and some people hate it, but he doesn't do too much hand-wringing about it. I'd love to do what Clint does."
Certainly, Damon hasn't been a hand-wringer when it comes to acting. Instead of simply "protecting the beachhead," as he puts it, sticking with action roles (and cashing the big paychecks), he has used the Bourne franchise to afford him the freedom to do lower-paying, noncommercial work that he finds worthy, often in supporting parts that don't get his name at the top of the call sheet. ("There are no small roles," he explains, winking at his dad. "Only small actors.") He played an energy analyst in Syriana, for example, Stephen Gaghan's 2005 drama about the forces driving the oil industry, and narrated the Oscar-winning 2010 documentary Inside Job, about the financial meltdown. For Soderbergh's The Informant!, in which he played a self-deluded whistle-blower who lies as much as he tells the truth, he gained thirty pounds, grew a doltish mustache, and wore a hairpiece. Oh, and he took a greatly reduced salary as well.
"I haven't made him a lot of money lately," Soderbergh says, noting that Damon's agent, Patrick Whitesell, "jokes, 'Whenever the phone rings from you guys, I know we're taking a haircut.' "
The Ocean's movies pay pretty well, Damon insists—"I think you get half your quote." (Which, if reports can be believed, would be about $5 million for Damon.) But even in those, which ooze glamour, he plays an oddball. And that, he says, is just the way he likes it. Given his castmates, he says, it's the only way to make a splash.
"Look," Damon says, "if you want to try and GQ it up with George and Brad, good luck! That's pretty rarefied air, and you're not going to bring more charm than those two, so you've got to find something else."
···
We're sitting near a throng of barking sea lions when I ask if he's read A Visit from the Goon Squad. He hasn't. "What is it?" he asks. "I've never heard of it." "It's Jennifer Egan's book," I say, pulling the slender novel from my bag. "It won the Pulitzer this year."
He laughs. "I'm like, 'I've never heard of it.' You're like, 'Well, it won the Pulitzer, dumb-ass.' " I explain that I brought the novel not to shame him, although that's kind of fun, but to show him a chapter that spoofs the very thing we're doing: a celebrity interview. In addition to being hilarious, the fake magazine profile in Egan's book—it's about a made-up actress named Kitty Jackson—drops a few real names, including Damon's. Kitty is said to belong "in the category of nice stars (Matt Damon) rather than of difficult stars (Ralph Fiennes). Stars in the nice category act as if they're just like you (i.e., me) so that you will like them and write flattering things about them, a strategy that is almost universally successful...."
I hand Damon the book. Keep it, I say. I don't tell him that in it, the journalist ends up trying to rape the celebrity-profile subject—in Central Park, no less. I don't reveal the book's suggestion that celebrity profilers are, metaphorically at least, having their way with their subjects. Because that would be kind of like saying that while interviewing Matt Damon, I'm also fucking Matt Damon. And as we all know, Sarah Silverman got there first. Here, Damon and Silverman on the making of "I'm Fucking Matt Damon."
Apparently, Damon doesn't just collect famous friends. Which makes sense, since his relationship with his own celebrity has been fraught. While he understands that profiles like this one play a part in marketing his films, he has at times been difficult when interviewers have tried to talk about anything more personal than global politics or film theory. The last time this magazine profiled him, in 2007, the writer resorted to describing the "excruciatingly long and loud—like, racehorse long-and-loud—piss" he took in a trailer lavatory, because "it was the most interesting thing he did over the course of...three hours."
Crowe has a theory about Damon's elusiveness. "Matt's a guy who skewers pretension. Hourly and by the minute, nothing is going to get pumped up into some lofty thing with Matt around," the director says. "It may not be as subversive as him trying to be tricky about not letting the interviewer get to him. It's more that he would skewer the guy that you mostly read in celebrity interviews. He laughs at that guy. He's very careful to not be that guy."
With me, he hasn't been that guy. He's been forthcoming—way more forthcoming, he already realizes, than he meant to be. Damon has very pointedly skewered someone—Gilroy—who he feels unfairly pumped himself up. And he regrets it. As this story is going to press, he'll call me to clarify: "If I didn't respect him and appreciate his talent, then I really wouldn't have cared.... My feelings were hurt. That's all. And that's exactly why I shouldn't have said anything. This is between me and him. So saying anything publicly is fucking stupid and unprofessional and just kind of douchey of me."
But that will come later. Now, at the zoo, his phone buzzes—his wife again. It's time to pick up their daughters from school, so Damon, his dad, and I head for the exit. There we meet up with Lucy, and we all walk briskly east, toward a huge chauffeured black Yukon XL that waits to whisk them away. Before we can get to it, though, a paparazzo suddenly charges toward us, his camera raised. He's not exactly menacing, but he's persistent, trying to herd Damon and his family into a single frame. Most movie stars of Damon's stature would have said, "This isn't funny—put a chain on that thing!" But Damon smiles a tight smile. "Here," he says politely, "you can take a shot of me and my pop." Damon stays in. You see him flinch, but he stays in.
_Amy Wallace is a GQ correspondent. _