Matt Damon "fell into a depression" filming an undisclosed bad Matt Damon movie
The Oppenheimer actor said that he struggles to complete movies he knows won't be good
Gather round, gossip fiends: it’s sure been one hell of a week for big-time movie stars shading their past flops. Two days ago, Robert Downey Jr. went on record claiming that 2020's Dolittle—the notorious critical disaster that seemingly only Britney Spears liked—was one of the most important films of his career because it represented a “two-and-a-half-year wound of squandered opportunity” that forced him to re-evaluate his priorities.
Now, Matt Damon is joining the #MyOwnPastWorkIsOverParty with some knocks on a film (or films) that he won’t name, but says caused him to “fall into a depression” after realizing that the movie was going to be, well, bad. (Hey Matt: it’s We Bought A Zoo, right? We don’t want to ruin any important business relationships, but blink twice if it’s We Bought A Zoo.)
“Without naming any particular movies… sometimes you find yourself in a movie that you know, perhaps, might not be what you had hoped it would be, and you’re still making it,” Damon said on a recent, Oppenheimer-focused episode of the YouTube series Jake’s Takes.
“And I remember halfway through production and you’ve still got months to go and you’ve taken your family somewhere, you know, and you’ve inconvenienced them, and I remember my wife [Luciana Barroso] pulling me up because I fell into a depression about like, what have I done?” he continued. (Okay, so probably not 2021's The Last Duel, which was a flop but was also filmed almost exclusively in gorgeous locales in Ireland and the South of France, which could hardly be considered an inconvenience to anybody.)
“[My wife] just said, ‘We’re here now.’ You know, and it was like…I do pride myself, in a large part because of her, at being a professional actor and what being a professional actor means is you go and you do the 15-hour day and give it absolutely everything, even in what you know is going to be a losing effort,” he continued. “And if you can do that with the best possible attitude, then you’re a pro, and she really helped me with that.”
Hopefully Damon doesn’t feel this way about any of the films he is producing under Artist’s Equity, the banner he shares with Ben Affleck that put forward 2023's Air. And whatever movie he is referring to (it’s probably We Bought A Zoo), we can be almost certain that it’s not Oppenheimer, which is already pulling in glowing reviews.