Matt Damon is no stranger to turning down potentially lucrative film opportunities. But him rejecting Rescue Dawn was a special case, as he did so after seeking advice from his mother.
Matt Damon’s mom predicted her son’s acting career years ago
Damon has been very open about his upbringing. Unlike some celebrities who were born into the business, Damon couldn’t have been raised further from Hollywood’s spotlight while growing up. He wasn’t exactly wealthy, but didn’t consider his family to be poor either.
“I was a middle-class kid and, relative to the rest of the world, that’s great wealth. As a parent, I think the question is, how do you raise any kid with a true understanding and context of what kind of life they have versus what kind of life other people have? It’s a constant struggle no matter who you are,” Damon once said in an interview with The Guardian.
Her mother, who he has great admiration for, was a professor. Drawing from perhaps motherly intuition, Damon’s mother predicted exactly the type of people her children would become.
“When I was two she would say she knew I was going to be an actor. And that she knew that my brother was going to be an artist: he’s a painter and sculptor. She could see from the way we played and what we were drawn to,” he said.
Damon’s mother also helped encourage her young son to pursue acting whenever she could. But his parents had reservations about Damon doing so for a living.
“My kindergarten teacher used to say to her I can’t get him out of the dressing-up area,” he said. “My mother would say: ‘That’s fine – leave him there.’ I was trying on every costume and role playing! My parents said: ‘We want you to act if that’s what you really want to do. But why do you want to do it professionally? Do local theatre. Acting professionally will only interfere with going to college. Why are you so impatient?’”
Matt Damon once turned down Christian Bale’s ‘Rescue Dawn’ role with help from his mother
Since becoming a superstar, Damon’s mother has continued to be instrumental in her son’s development as an actor. She’s even advised the superstar on the types of roles he should either take or stay away from.
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In 2006, Christian Bale starred in the Werner Herzog film Rescue Dawn. The film was based on real-life events that happened to a German American pilot. Before Bale landed the project, however, Damon was originally approached for the role.
“I’d say one of the biggest ones, there was the Werner Herzog movie called Rescue Dawn that Christian Bale did, and Werner and I were talking about that– this was eight years ago, about me possibly playing that role. I was really strongly considering it, and instead I met with the Farrelly Brothers,” Damon once said according to Cinemablend.
His mother also helped convince him to turn down Rescue Dawn in favor of the Farrelly Brothers movie Stuck On You. This turned out to be a blessing to Damon’s personal life, as he met his life partner thanks to the latter film.
“I remember talking to my mother, and my mother said ‘You don’t always have to go into the jungle and lose a bunch of weight, you’re allowed to have fun.’ And I did the Farrelly Brothers movie [Stuck On You] and that was where I met my wife. Four kids later, that was a pretty fateful decision,” he said.
Matt Damon had similar views towards violence as his mother, which affected his Jason Bourne video game
Damon’s iconic Jason Bourne series is one of the many blockbusters to his name. The spy films were so successful they even eventually spun out into the video game world with the Xbox 360 game The Bourne Conspiracy. But it was a product Damon would later disassociate himself from due to its take on violence.
“I lobbied hard to not make a first-person-shooter game but to make it more like Myst, which was a great, interesting puzzle you tried to solve — you know, to play with his amnesia or his memory,” Damon once told Boston Globe (via MTV News). “They weren’t interested. They made the [game] anyway, without my likeness.”
Similarly, Damon’s mother had an opinion that wasn’t too far off from her son’s. Although they butted heads when it came to film violence, they saw eye-to-eye on video games.
“I am very wary of violent video games,” she said. “Research shows they desensitize kids to violence, even more because they engage kids in committing violence.”
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