For many readers, the celebrity profile defines the modern magazine; few consumer titles are published without at least one inside. Yet no matter how well crafted, these stories are often dismissed as the magazine equivalent of a loss leader. But many magazines—and many writers—not only take profiles seriously but also use them to tell us something about the way we live now. Esquire is one of those magazines, and Tom Junod—whose stories have won two National Magazine Awards and have been nominated for nine more—is one of those writers. This is the third year in a row Esquire has been nominated for Magazine of the Year, and this profile of Matt Damon by Tom Junod was one of the cover stories that earned Esquire that honor.
Let’s face it, the guy is ridiculous.
He’s ridiculously handsome. He’s ridiculously accomplished. He’s ridiculously smart. He’s ridiculously kind to those in need of his kindness. He’s ridiculously funny. He’s ridiculously magnetic, with a ridiculously white movie-star smile and a ridiculously resonant voice-talent voice. Despite his ridiculous sense of ease and casual aplomb, he cannot go anywhere without making an entrance for the simple reason that people who feel ridiculous staring at him feel even more ridiculous not staring at him. All he has to do is smile and open his mouth and he switches on an inner light that turns every head, even Matt Damon’s.
Now, just to be clear, Matt Damon is also ridiculous. Indeed, Damon is so ridiculous—so ridiculously handsome, accomplished, smart, funny, etc.—that he has been holding forth on the subject of German Holocaust awareness while drinking beer and eating steak on the patio of a hotel restaurant in Germany without sounding ridiculous himself. Damon does this a lot. He holds forth. He drinks beer. He holds forth while drinking beer, often with members of the crew of the movie he happens to be making, which in this case is The Monuments Men, the story of the American soldiers charged with recovering the vast stashes of priceless art stolen by the Nazis. Damon’s the most social of movie stars, the most easily conversant, and so he holds forth lightly, his knowledge of history just as much a social lubricant as the beer he keeps ordering for the table. He’s sitting with a young actor, a military consultant, a script supervisor, and me, and with a ridiculous lack of anything resembling effort he keeps all eyes trained upon him until—
“Ah, he’s back!”
It’s Clooney It’s the boss. It’s the guy who’s directing The Monuments Men as well as starring in it, and it’s the guy whose unabashed incandescence makes Damon’s feel suddenly like the light from a sustainable bulb. Did I say Clooney’s ridiculous? Clooney’s ridiculous. He’s back from a weekend in Berlin, nearly three hours away, and he looks as though he just stepped out of the shower. He’s skinny, almost gaunt in a T-shirt and baggy belted jeans, but with the elemental sheen of his swept-back gray hair and his gray mustache, he looks like Clark Gable, circa The Misfits, which is to say a movie star in any era, America’s gift to the world. There’s a small lake next to the hotel patio; earlier, Damon had changed places and put his back to it, because on the other side there gathered a host of photographers and German townspeople—civilians. Now Clooney walks over to him and says, “Hey, you folks are the entertainment.”
“There are photographers,” Damon says, because in the world he shares with Clooney, starstruck civilians are symptoms of a disease; photographers are active agents of infection.
“Yeah, I know,” Clooney says. “I saw ’em all. One guy’s got a lens like this.” He spreads his hands around an imaginary object the size of a beach ball.
“They’re all back because you’re back,” Damon tells him. “Today, I literally walked out the back door and walked up the street. Nobody was there.”
“They don’t follow you, but they follow him?” I ask.
Clooney leans over slightly and put his hand on Damon’s shoulder. His smile is like the cleaver that chefs use in Japanese steakhouses—it looks too big and too sharp to handle, but he’s tossing it around for fun. “You have to get your second Sexiest Man Alive,” he says to Damon. “You get your second Sexiest, they follow you like crazy.”
• • •
In the forthcoming movie Elysium (out August 9), the boy who plays Matt Damon’s character as a little boy looks a lot like Matt Damon must have looked when he was a child. “When I first saw the photos, I thought someone Photoshopped Matt’s face on them,” says director Neill Blomkamp. “When Matt saw them, he said, ‘Jesus, that looks like me.’”
In the movie, the boy spends most of his time on earth—which is, of course, hellishly “postapocalyptic”—staring into the sky at the enormous wheel of a satellite that provides refuge for the rich, who have abandoned the planet. The satellite is called Elysium, and when the little boy who grows up to become Matt Damon stares at the sky, he vows to get there. He winds up with a shaved head, a shitload of tattoos, a flash drive jacked into his brain stem, and an exoskeleton of body armor screwed into his very bones. He also winds up engaging in the kind of expertly choreographed yet relatively realistic fights Damon mastered in the Bourne series but that the presence of the exoskeleton made challenging—but get there he does, fomenting revolution in the process.
Blomkamp wrote the movie after his District 9 turned into one of the surprise hits of 2009. Let Damon tell his story because Damon likes to tell stories: “When I first met him, Neill said, ‘I grew up in South Africa. I grew up in a nice neighborhood in Johannesburg, but we’d drive a few miles and see poverty as abject as any place on earth. Then, when I was eighteen, we moved to Canada and the experience of moving to the First World so shocked me that all my life, everything I do, all my work, is a rumination on that incredible difference.’”
Now let Blomkamp: “I wanted to make a film that separated rich and poor in a science-fiction way. And I thought it would be really interesting to take a corn-fed American white boy and put him in a Third World environment—to take someone that America knows well and put him in an America as run-down as possible. And Matt was the right guy for that, not only as an actor but as a persona.”
He did not film Elysium in the run-down parts of America. He filmed it, as he says, in the “most poverty-stricken parts of Mexico City. I very specifically scouted the areas because I wanted them to be as run-down as possible. That was Matt’s only trepidation—the security in Mexico City. He’s very game, but the whole thing there is kidnapping, and it’s different with him than it is with you or me. He’s internationally recognized. People know he’s in the country. We had to hire a security firm. Our security guys would run different routes to the set in the morning, do reconnaissance, make sure there were in-and-out routes everyplace we went.”
Elysium is an interesting movie. But one of the most interesting things about it is that in order for it to exist, it had to be made by people from Elysium. Elysium is not just a metaphor for apartheid or for the growing divide between rich and poor in this country. It is a metaphor for celebrity and the privileges it bestows. Matt Damon plays a man who is willing to sacrifice everything in order to get there, and his portrayal is complicated by the fact that he lives there already.
• • •
“Would you like a small beer?” a waitress asks.
“No,” Matt Damon says. “A big beer.”
We are sitting at a table in a hotel lobby two and a half hours outside of Berlin. The table is small and round and high, the chairs tall and wobbly. We are meeting in the lobby because we’re supposed to go out on a journalistic version of a date, Matt and I. We’re supposed to go for a hike and then have a conversation over dinner. But then a waitress comes by and asks the persistent German question: “Would you like a beer?” She is very short, under five feet tall, with jet-black hair and sharp, dark features inked on very white skin. She is wearing the traditional folk costume that every waitress in Germany who works outside a major city has to wear in disconcerting ubiquity. It’s just after five o’clock. Dinner is scheduled for eight. There’s plenty of time for each of us to drink a beer before the hike, even a big beer.
“The thing that I like about Germany is that Germans are so much like us,” he says when the beer arrives in tall clear glasses. “It’s not like going to some other countries, where the differences are overwhelming and you walk around in a fog. Germans are so similar to Americans. They’re, like, only 5 percent different—but then that difference makes all the difference. It makes everything that much stranger. You think that everything is going to be exactly the same, and when it’s not it seems much stranger to you, and you realize that you must seem stranger to them. It’s clarifying, man.”
Damon is forty-two years old, married, father of four. Along with unfaded jeans, he is wearing black—a black V-neck T-shirt, big black punk-rock boots, a black-ball cap imprinted with a pattern of four black stars. He has short brown hair haunted by a blond ghost. He is a shade under six feet tall, in shape but not in action-movie shape, not in ass-kicking Elysium shape. He has what Neill Blomkamp saw in him, what everybody sees in him: a broad, friendly American face, not so much youthful as still boyish, interesting primarily for what can be imprinted upon it—the tabula rasa of its blue eyes, turned-up nose, and perfectly even white teeth. In the movies, he has the most useful smile since Tom Cruise’s, but whereas Cruise uses his smile to overpower, to silence doubters, and to get out of trouble, Damon uses his to express nuance, as both beacon and shadow. In person, he does the same thing. He smiles a lot, but he has a smile that can operate at cross-purposes with his eyes. Hell, he can smile while turning down the corners of his mouth; more precisely, he can turn down the corners of his mouth and still smile, without appearing to smirk or frown. It’s either a trick or a talent, but in any case it’s nearly impossible to do, and it shows why, when Blomkamp says “He’s almost like a regular guy who’s a global celebrity,” almost is the operative word.
He is not a regular guy. He is to regular guys as he says Germans are to Americans—about 5 percent different. For comparison’s sake, let’s say George Clooney is about 15 percent different. Brad Pitt is about 12.5 percent different, and Leonardo DiCaprio has never been a regular guy, so he offers no basis for calculation. But Damon is so close to being a regular guy that he can pass as a regular guy onscreen and off-. He can be the same guy onscreen and off-, and so he offers audiences the rarest of combinations—the satisfaction of reliability and surprise. It was a surprise when he was able to both write and star in Good Will Hunting. It was a surprise when he was able to pull off the Bourne series. It was a surprise when he was so funny on Jimmy Kimmel and 30 Rock. It was a surprise when he wore a thong for Michael Douglas in Behind the Candelabra. (“Though I’ve seen Matt’s ass quite a lot, it was nice to get an update,” says his friend Ben Affleck.) But he can be continually surprising in his performances because he is so reliably unsurprising in his life—because he fulfills expectations instead of confounding them. Matt Damon is a movie star because he always delivers on being Matt Damon. He is a movie star not only because he makes us want to have a beer with him but also because he makes us think that, alone among movie stars, he might actually want to have a beer with us …
And then he orders his second big beer ten minutes after his first.
• • •
We never go on the hike. We never go out to dinner. We never even stand up, except for the necessities. As soon as we start drinking, members of the crew and cast of The Monuments Men start stopping by. The hotel is a refuge, with tall, black iron gates and security guards with walkie-talkies. Our table is not. When the actor Bob Balaban walks by, Damon says, “Hey, man!” When the lead gaffer walks by, Damon says, “Hey, man!” When a military advisor named Billy Budd walks by, Damon says, “Hey, man!” And he says the same thing to a young actor named Diarmaid Murtagh. Budd is a Brit, a former marine in the service of the queen, with a silver brush cut, a big hawk nose that casts a shadow on his scorched face, and arms scrawled with fiendish tattoos. Murtagh is an Irishman, with an explosive laugh and an Irish thirst. They’re both first-class storytellers, and when they sit with us, they sit with us for the next seven hours. I never get the chance to do a long interview with Matt Damon because Matt Damon is never alone. But that’s okay. I’ve talked to movie stars before. I’ve never had a chance to hear what movie stars talk about, inside the gates of Elysium.
• • •
Here’s a story. Matt Damon told it. But it’s not about Matt Damon. It’s about Bono. But it’s not really about Bono, either; it’s about Paul McCartney. But Damon heard it from Bono. One day, Bono flew into Liverpool. Paul was supposed to pick him up at the airport, and Bono was shocked when Paul picked him up at the airport alone, behind the wheel of his car. “Would you like to go on a little tour?” Paul said. Sure, Bono said, because Bono, you see, is a fan of Paul’s, in the same way that Damon is a fan of Bono’s. “Bono’s obsessed with the Beatles,” Damon said at the table in the lobby of the gated hotel in the little town in Germany. “He’s, like, a student of the Beatles. He’s read every book on the Beatles. He’s seen every bit of film. There’s nothing he doesn’t know. So when Paul stops and says ‘That’s where it happened,’ Bono’s like, ‘That’s where what happened?’ because he thinks he knows everything. And Paul says, ‘That’s where the Beatles started. That’s where John gave me half his chocolate bar.’ And now Bono’s like, ‘What chocolate bar? I’ve never heard of any chocolate bar.’ And Paul says, ‘John had a chocolate bar, and he shared it with me. And he didn’t give me some of his chocolate bar. He didn’t give me a square of his chocolate bar. He didn’t give me a quarter of his chocolate bar. He gave me half of his chocolate bar. And that’s why the Beatles started right there.’ Isn’t that fantastic? It’s the most important story about the Beatles, and it’s in none of the books! And Paul tells it to Bono. Because he knows how much Bono loves the Beatles.”
Now, George Clooney is right—People has named Matt Damon Sexiest Man Alive only once. He is not the biggest global celebrity. He’s not the biggest movie star, and it’s a matter of debate whether he’s the most handsome in Jimmy Kimmel’s “Handsome Men’s Club.” But he’s pretty damned close—close enough to be on the inside, close enough to hear the stories, close enough to tell the stories, close enough to tell stories about those who tell the stories. And the stories—well, they’re delicious, sweetened by their exclusivity and by the fact that they’re strictly rationed. They’re in none of the books, and for good reason: They’re occasionally too good to be true.
• • •
You want to know what famous people talk about? They talk about you and me, first of all—the people on the other side of the lake, the people peering inside the window, the extent to which they’ll go to get a look or a photograph. Then they talk about one another. Those are the best stories because they’re also performances. Damon is famous for his Matthew McConaughey imitation, but three or four or five or six big beers into the night, he did quick imitations of nearly everyone he talked about. He did Scorsese and Spielberg and Clint Eastwood. He did Russell Crowe and he did Tom Cruise. He did Russell Crowe talking about his relationship with director Ridley Scott—“Rid’s the general, I’m the soldier, and when we make a movie, we go to warl”—and he did Tom Cruise talking about the stunt director for one of the Mission: Impossible movies who refused to let him climb the side of a building without a stunt double. “I asked Tom, ‘Well, what did you do?’ And he looked at me”—and here Damon reproduced the Thetanic fixity of Cruise’s stare and the martinet hysteria of his voice—“and said, ‘I fired him, Matt.’”
He told the Tom Cruise story for two reasons. Number one, it is a Tom Cruise story. Number two, Damon doesn’t climb buildings. He’s afraid of heights, and, he says, “That’s what Stuntmen are for. That’s what green screens are for. But Tom’s incredible. I said, ‘You have the title. Nobody’s ever going to take the title from you. You win.’ He laughed. But he also goes, ‘It was worth it’ And it was—for him. It’s not for me. I’m way too old to do all my own stunts.”
And that’s the other thing about the stories famous people tell. They tend to tell stories about people more famous than they are. Matt Damon tells stories about Tom Cruise and George Clooney He tells a story about Bono telling a story about Paul McCartney. There are rings of fame, like some kind of obverse Inferno, and the people inside one ring tell stories about people in another—the ones who are farther inside, closer to some kind of impossible absolute. It’s a form of gossip, sure, and also of adulation, but it’s also an education, often the best education they’ve received. Damon left Harvard without graduating, but he’s something of a polymath who, no matter the subject, can tell you what he’s learned about it not just from the book he’s read but also from the person who wrote the book he’s read. He drops names like crazy, but he’s not so much a name-dropper as he is a student citing his sources. He talks about talking to Tom Cruise, Jodie Foster, Michael Strahan, Tom Brady, Martin Scorsese, Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Emily Blunt, and his friends Ben and Casey Affleck, but he also talks about talking to Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Farmer, Ray Kurzweil, Dave Eggers, and other assorted writers, economists, scientists, and advocates. He has access to them all in the same way that he has access to tables at the most exclusive restaurants, and it no longer matters that he dropped out of Harvard—fame has become his Harvard. In the globalized world, the false currency of celebrity has turned out to be the only one that resists devaluation because it has become the price of access and access has become the price of knowledge. We like to think that fame insulates its denizens from the real world. It is painful to contemplate what everyone drinking beer in that hotel lobby seemed to know—that fame brings the famous closer to the heart of things, or at least closer than the people clustered outside the gate can ever get.
• • •
My mother thought it was child abuse,” he says. “She literally did. She was a professor who specialized in early childhood development, and she thought putting a child onstage or in a commercial or in a movie was child abuse. So when I did Elysium with Jodie Foster, I asked her. I mean, she’s basically been acting since she was born. I figured if anyone’s going to know, it should be her, right? So I asked her. And she sort of smiled and said, ‘It depends on the child.’”
Matt Damon was not a child actor. He was a child and then an adolescent enriched by progressive education in Cambridge, Massachusetts—by Howard Zinn as his neighbor, by Cambridge Rindge and Latin as his high school, by immersive-language study with Mom in Mexico and Guatemala as his summer vacation. But his friend Ben Affleck was a child actor, and acting became the ambitious way Matt separated himself from his mother’s ambitions. He not only acted in school plays; he also worked as an extra in Boston and can do an imitation of the guy who was, like, “the king of the extras, because he’d worked on Scorsese movies. And he was like, ‘Me and Marty, we’re like this. I give Marty exactly what he wants.’ And I’m sitting at this guy’s feet, thinking, Hey, one day, maybe that could be me.”
At the time, Affleck was the star, both in school plays and at auditions. But Damon permitted himself to learn from him, and they became not just friends but also a team. “The summer after freshman year in college, we got a job together. I was eighteen. There was a theater in Harvard Square called the Janus. They had only one screen, and Ben and I got a job there. We were ticket takers and served popcorn—we basically did everything. But the kicker was that the movie we showed that summer was a movie Ben and I got relatively close on—Dead Poets Society. We got down the line; we got called back. Ben got even closer than I did. And that was the one movie they showed that summer. It was a constant reminder. We’d sit there, these young ambitious guys in our maroon vests, our black pants, our white shirts, and our fucking name tags, watching people coming out of the theater bawling their fucking eyes out.
“It was like, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ But it underscored the difficulty of breaking in, enough that we were convinced we had to start writing.”
Good Will Hunting began as a lark, the fanciful idea of two kids who loved to learn but didn’t want to go to school. “We were like, ‘Wouldn’t that be cool if you could read every book in the world and remember everything you read?’” But it became, Damon says, “an act of desperation.” Multiple drafts, written in multiple rented apartments over multiple years, developed by multiple studios: “We had an unlimited amount of time. It wasn’t like anybody cared. It wasn’t like anybody was waiting to see what we were doing…”
But then, of course, it changed everything. The Best Screenplay Oscar changed everything. “Being known as a writer did change the relationships I had with directors. The rap on actors is that they always want to inflate their parts. But when directors know you write screenplays and have a different view of things, you really get invited into the huddle in a much fuller way. And those collaborations end in friendships. That’s how it works. It really is all about relationships. If you enjoy working with someone, you’ll find a way to work with him or her again. It’s human nature.”
When Damon was in high school and in college, he had a Mickey Rourke poster on the wall of his bedroom. (Affleck: “I don’t remember that. I remember the Michael Jackson.”) Mickey Rourke was his favorite actor; he wanted to be Mickey Rourke. And so when he was still very young—before Good Will Hunting made him a star—and he got the lead role in The Rainmaker alongside Mickey Rourke, “I was really excited just to meet him. And then the first day of filming, he pulls me aside and just reads me the riot act. We were shooting in a really bad neighborhood in Memphis—we had security and everything—and I’m standing on a street corner and my boyhood idol is yelling at me. He’s saying, ‘Francis Ford Coppola wanted you for this movie—that’s a big deal. That sends a message to everyone in Hollywood that you have a future. So don’t do what I did. Don’t fuck it up!’”
And Damon hasn’t. He might give the appearance of being a regular guy, but he hasn’t done what regular guys always do—he hasn’t fucked it up. He understands better than anyone else that celebrity is a social contract, and he has fulfilled it to the last jot and tittle. He’s passed every possible test of citizenship that fame could offer, and what you understand when you spend time with him is simply this:
He’s a member of the club.
• • •
There’s a young actor with a big role in The Monuments Men. His name is Dimitri Leonidas, and he was, until Clooney cast him, a so-called unknown. He’s not one of the cast members who walk through the hotel lobby on either night that Damon is drinking beer. But Damon talks about him and says how bright his future is. He doesn’t say that his future is bright as an actor, though. He says, “He could be a movie star.”
What does that mean, exactly? It’s uttered by a movie star, so it must mean something—it must mean that there are some qualifications for the job, and you don’t know what they are until you get it. It must mean that Matt Damon recognizes some kindred quality in Dimitri Leonidas, some degree of difference that only those with their own inexplicable difference can see. It also means that Damon thinks about these things a lot. He thinks about stardom and he thinks about fame, not to glory in them but to assess his own degree of difference and dislocation. He talks about what happened to him when he became a movie star as though it’s irrevocable:
“When it happens to you, it’s not that you change. Everybody says you change, and you do eventually. But what happens, almost overnight, is that nothing and everything changes at the same time. You’re aware that everything that mattered yesterday still matters today. Everything is the same, and intellectually you understand that. But the world is completely different—for you. Everybody has changed their relationship to you, but you still live in the same world. So when people talk about the surreality of fame, that’s what they’re talking about. That’s what it was for me. It’s walking into a restaurant and everybody turns their head and starts whispering—and you’re like, ‘But I ate at this restaurant last week’ And so the world is still the same—it’s just never going to be the same for me. And that’s a real mind-fuck. The world is one degree stranger. It’s not like the houses have suddenly turned to gingerbread and you go, ‘Oh, it wasn’t like that before.’ You live in the same house, you go to the same market, you get coffee in the same place. It’s just that somebody has hired an unlimited amount of extras and given them very specific directions—for you. It’s as if a director has gotten there before you and grabbed a bullhorn and said, ‘Okay, when he comes in, if your name begins with A through M, count to ten and then notice him. N through Z, notice him right away’ It’s very strange.”
• • •
Here’s another story. Matt Damon tells it, but it’s not about Matt Damon. It’s about Brad Pitt. But it is also about Matt Damon because it’s about fame and Matt Damon is famous. But is he as famous as Brad Pitt? Is he as big a movie star? In some ways, he’s bigger—with the Bourne movies, he created the action franchise that Pitt hopes to create with World War Z. But there are measures of stardom other than weekend grosses, indices of which ring you occupy other than money. One is your degree of convergence with Bono. Another is pain.
“If you can control the celebrity side of celebrity,” Damon says, “then it’s worth it. I look at Brad—and I have for years—and when I’m with him I see the intensity of that other side of it. And the paparazzi and the insane level of aggression they have and their willingness to break the law and invade his space—well, I wonder about that trade. I remember telling him that I walk my kids to school, and his face just fell. He was very kind, but he was like, ‘You bastard.’ Because he should be able to do that, too. And he can’t.”
Damon can. He lives in New York, and he walks his kids to school. Photographers occasionally dog his steps, but generally from a distance, and if he asks them to back off, they will after they get their shots. He can do this because of what he didn’t do—or whom he didn’t marry. “I got lucky,” he says. “I fell in love with a civilian. Not an actress and not a famous actress at that. Because then the attention doesn’t double—it grows exponentially. Because then suddenly everybody wants to be in your bedroom. But I don’t really give them anything. If I’m not jumping up and down on a bar, or lighting something on fire, or cheating on my wife, there’s not really any story to tell. They can try to stake me out, but they’re always going to get the same story—middle-aged married guy with four kids. So as long as that narrative doesn’t change too much, there’s no appetite for it.”
The narrative, however, is about to change. Damon and his wife, Lucy, and their four children are about to move to LA, despite knowing they will lose some of their privacy to an entrenched apparatus of snoops. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner live there, and even though “there are five or six photographers outside their house all the time,” Damon and his family have bought a house on the same street. Second, Damon and Affleck have started a production company, Pearl Street Films, “and we finally just rented offices and it’s like, Let’s get serious.” And third, “Most of our old friends with kids live in LA, and their kids don’t know me. I don’t like that.” (Affleck: “It’s like being in the neighborhood again.”)
But the fourth and final reason is the most interesting. Damon is buying a house in Los Angeles because he couldn’t buy one in New York. “We tried to find a place for four years and couldn’t find one. We made five offers, and we had two places where we had a verbal agreement, the last of which I absolutely loved. And in both cases, they used my name to sell to someone else. In a lot of transactional situations, fame is a good thing—people are much nicer to you. But in this case, it worked against me. Or maybe people think I’m an actor, so I must be stupid.”
• • •
I drank beer for seven hours with Matt Damon on one night and four hours on another. I learned a lot of things. Because Damon knows the director Doug Liman, I learned that Tiger Woods kept missing the ball in that famous Nike commercial until the camera was turned on, whereupon he bounced it on the face of an iron and then whacked it two hundred yards. Because he knows Casey Affleck, I know that Joaquin Phoenix’s “break-down” really was a piece of performance art intended for the Affleck-directed documentary I’m Still Here, and that David Letterman really was pissed off when Affleck and Phoenix revealed the hoax to the New York Times instead of on his show. And because he knows Christopher Hitchens’s agent, I know the last thing Hitchens said before he died.
I found out like this. Damon was talking about going to watch a TED Talk in the company of Paul Farmer, the great physician to the poor and one of Damon’s heroes. They went to see Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister and, as Farmer told Damon, one of the handful of people “who know how the world works.” Damon went and was amazed that every single one of Brown’s sentences was complete and every single one of his thoughts conformed to the shape of a paragraph—and that he didn’t use a teleprompter.
“Christopher Hitchens was like that,” I said. “I saw him speak once, drunk, and if someone had written the whole thing down, he could have handed it in as an essay.”
“I know his agent,” Damon said, for he is both possessor and habitual proprietor of upstream knowledge. “And he told me Hitchens’s last words.”
We all waited. It was our chocolate bar.
“They were capitalism fail.”
When I came home, I discovered that Andrew Sullivan knows the same agent and wrote on the Daily Beast that Hitchens’s last words were “capitalism downfall.” I have no idea which version is correct. But that’s not the end of the story. The end of the story comes the next day, when Damon returns to his hotel room after a morning of filming and is inspired by the words “capitalism fail” to go online and watch a lecture by one of his former professors at Harvard, Michael Sandel. “I took his class twenty-three years ago, and now I’m taking it again,” he says a few hours later on the patio. The same tiny waitress in the same traditional frock asks him if he’d like a beer, and this time he says, “Yes, a large beer” and begins speaking about what he learned from Sandel.
“He was asking about the things that money can’t buy,” Damon said. “He was saying that we’ve gone from a market economy to a market society, where we’re essentially trying to monetize everything. He gave all these examples, like this jail in Santa Barbara where you can pay for a nicer cell and better treatment. The world changes in a fundamental way when you can buy your way out of any situation.”
I mentioned an experience I’d had over the summer, when I took my daughter to a water park we’d been to many times and found it transformed by the availability of a “Fast Pass,” which allows visitors to pay an extra forty-five dollars to go to the head of the lines. “It changed everything,” I said, “because people were now paying to cut the line, and everybody knew that it was unfair. I knew it, my daughter knew it, and so did the people doing the cutting.”
Damon nodded. “If you really want to know what it’s like to be famous, all you have to do is go to that water park and pay your forty-five bucks. Go to the water park and that’s what it’s like.
“You jump the line.”
• • •
Here’s one last story. Matt Damon tells it, but it’s not about Matt Damon. It’s about George Clooney. But it’s not really about George Clooney, either, because Damon wouldn’t be telling it if it weren’t also about Russell Crowe. Damon loves telling Russell Crowe stories, in Russell Crowe’s voice. But the story’s all about the questions of selling out and hypocrisy, so maybe it’s about Damon after all. He’s been wrestling with these things because he recently began lending his ridiculously believable speaking voice to commercials. It frankly seems an unnecessary inner struggle, given that everybody in his business, from Jeff Bridges to Jon Hamm to Denis Leary, is allowing himself to be used as voice talent.
“I know,” he says, “but it’s still a commercial. What’s the line that Paul Newman used to say—‘shameless exploitation in pursuit of common good’? I tell myself that. I mean, I give all the money to [Damon’s foundation] Water.org. I couldn’t imagine keeping it. But let’s face it—the money I contribute from the commercial is money I don’t have to contribute from my pocket. One way or another, I’m getting paid. So maybe I’m a big hypocrite.”
Of course, Clooney does a lot of voice work, too, especially in Europe. And one day, Damon says, “Russell called him out for doing a commercial in Italy. He called him a sellout—George, who never got full boat. George, who’s always cutting his deal to work with the directors he wants to work with. So George said, ‘Wait a minute. The only way I could live is if I do this fucking espresso commercial. What the fuck? Why are you attacking me? You’re calling me a sellout? Look at your fucking movies, man!’
“And George is the best prankster. But he doesn’t do anything. He’s furious—but he sits on it. And then Russell wins a [British Academy of Film and Television Arts] award, and he goes up in front of the BAFTAs and reads a poem he wrote. He goes on for so long that when they show it that night, they edit it. They’re at a party and they’re all in tuxedos and they’re playing the thing back, and Russell sees that his speech is truncated. And he famously grabs the producer of the show and throws him against the wall, and it has to be broken up.
“So the next year, George gets nominated. He’s got Good Night, and Good Luck and he’s got Michael Clayton, and he’s up for, like, fifty fucking BAFTAs. And he wins one of them. So he gets onstage. But a few weeks before, he was in a bookstore and saw a book by Russell Crowe. It’s called My Heart, My Song, and it’s a book of Russell’s poetry.
“So George gets up in front of the BAFTA audience, and they’re cheering him on, and he goes, ‘I hear you like poetry’ And instantly the place goes dead quiet. Then he just reaches into his tux and pulls out the book, and he goes, ‘My Heart, My Song, by Russell Crowe.’ And the place instantly goes wild. He picks a poem to read, and every line people are falling out of their chairs and he’s gotta hold twenty seconds for their laughter.
“And he reads the whole thing and he says, ‘Thank you. Good night, good luck.’
“And he walks off.”
It’s a delicious story, too good to be true. Russell Crowe did, in fact, read a poem at the BAFTA awards in 2002, but not one of his own. He made a CD called My Hand, My Heart, but he has never published a book of poems. George Clooney never won a BAFTA until this year, when he won as a producer of Affleck’s Argo. Does any of this make the story any less delicious? It does not, because the story’s flavor does not derive from its veracity. It derives from proximity—from the fact that you are listening to Matt Damon tell it on the patio instead of watching him tell it from the other side of the lake.
• • •
The sun’s going down when his BlackBerry pings. He pulls it out of his pocket, and when he looks at it he almost seems to flinch, but it’s the quick jolt of his smile snapping his head back an inch. He’s at a table full of people, but he does not take his eyes off the screen. His face fills with light, and what can be heard, in the sudden silence, is the voice of a little girl reporting the news from home: the fact that one of Damon’s other daughters has lost a tooth. Then we hear what he hears—“I love you, Daddy!”—and his smile deepens as his shoulders sag, and we see that look of pride and pain common to every father in the world who has to experience the love of a child from a helpless distance. He can’t answer because what he’s just seen is a video that his children made and his wife attached to an e-mail. So he doesn’t say anything, just slides the BlackBerry back in his pocket, and for the first time since I’ve met him, Matt Damon is, for the moment, alone.
There are a few more stories and a few more beers, but the dusk deepens to darkness, and he stands up to go back to his room. George Clooney is long gone, but along and across the lake they are still clustered, and now they wave to him. They have been waiting for him to go before they disperse, and he waves back. They are all Germans, 5 percent different from him, but he is 5 percent different not just from them but also from everyone else. When he turns his back on them one last time, they call “Goodnight” to him, in English.