Christopher Nolan Was The Only Person Who Could End Matt Damon's Acting Break

Matt Damon is a constant presence in Hollywood. He's just always there, doing something interesting and delivering solid performances across the board. But far from just being a rent-a-star type, if you look back at Matt Damon's best movies, there's some pretty impressive stuff there, with the guy seemingly not letting up since he and his buddy Ben Affleck essentially jump started their own careers by writing "Good Will Hunting."

Now, he's part of an ensemble cast led by Cillian Murphy in "Oppenheimer," Christopher Nolan's biopic about the so-called father of the atomic bomb. Damon plays Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the Manhattan project which infamously led to the creation of the first nuclear weapon. The "Oppenheimer" trailers show Damon doing what he does, providing some veteran movie star magnetism and being a solid scene partner for Murphy, who is leading a Nolan film for the first time with this three-hour epic.

But it could have very easily been someone else in the role of Groves, as Damon was supposed to be on a brief acting break prior to being cast in Nolan's biopic. Having appeared in 2021's "Stillwater" and "The Last Duel," then providing a brief cameo for 2022's "Thor: Love and Thunder," Damon kicked off 2023 with the excellent "Air" for Amazon Studios. A quick look into his filming schedule reveals the man was basically shooting stuff back-to-back right up to 2020 in order to churn out these successive projects, wrapping "The Last Duel" in October of that year. The "Bourne" star wouldn't have started filming again until June 2022 when "Air" got underway if it wasn't for a call from Nolan.

Christopher Nolan claims to never have a cast in mind when writing a script, but something tells me he was thinking of Cillian Murphy long before he finished adapting Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's J. Robert Oppenheimer biography "American Prometheus." According to the filmmaker, who spoke about casting to The Hollywood Reporter, he'd been "staring at the cover of the book 'American Prometheus'" for months, which featured a black and white photograph of its subject. The director said, "I thought, 'Well, I know who could do that.'"

When it came to the rest of the cast, Nolan's reputation as one of today's premier directors worked very much in his favor, resulting in what sounds like a relatively painless casting process in which actors were compelled to say "yes" on the spot. That was certainly the case with Robert Downey Jr., how told THR, "Usually, there's 38 phone calls. But he's Chris Nolan. So I was like, 'Yeah,'" Matt Damon, who'd worked with Nolan previously on "Interstellar" and had turned down playing Two-Face in "The Dark Knight," was supposed to be on his well-earned acting break. But thanks to an unlikely agreement with his wife, he was able to accept Nolan's offer and shoot "Oppenheimer" prior to starting work on "Air." As he told Entertainment Weekly:

"I had negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off. [...] but I actually negotiated in couples therapy the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called. This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you. He just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household."

Christopher Nolan is a part of an increasingly rare class in Hollywood. Much like whenever a Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese film gets released, when a Nolan film arrives, it's a big deal. Which is clearly part of the reason Matt Damon made sure he could make himself available should the director call, despite being on his supposed acting break.

But beyond the general reverence audiences and the industry have for Nolan, Damon has seems to have harbored a specific admiration for the "Dark Knight" filmmaker ever since "Interstellar." As he previously told The Playlist, "I subsequently did a small role in one of Christopher Nolan's movies in 'Interstellar.' I wanted to be part of that troupe, he works with the same actors over and over again, but I wanted to be on that ride."

Of course, any actor who cares about their craft would want to be part of a big-name director's go-to list of performers. But Damon seems personally in awe of Nolan, perhaps due to the fact that he himself is an Oscar-winning screenwriter. The actor told ET that when he read the "Oppenheimer" script he simply had "no notes," which may well have offended Nolan, but was merely an expression of appreciation for the director's writing talents. Whether all of this translates to one of Damon's best performances is yet to be seen, but all will be revealed when "Oppenheimer" debuts on July 21, 2023.