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Matt Damon reflected on his very first film role, and why he wasn’t upset it was so brief
Damon had one line in a scene in 1988’s Mystic Pizza
Damon said that one-day roles can be some of the hardest for actors
Matt Damon’s first movie role included just one line — and he was positively thrilled.
Damon, 55, and his The Rip costar (and lifelong friend) Ben Affleck appeared on the Jan. 12 episode of The Howard Stern Show for a lengthy conversation about their careers. While discussing the art of acting, Stern, 72, asked Damon about his earliest movie role — one scene in 1988’s Mystic Pizza. During the family dinner (that turns into major drama), Damon, seated at the same table as a young Julia Roberts, had just one line. After receiving his lobster for dinner, he says, “Mom do you want my green stuff?”
“But when you’re sitting at that dinner table, is it harder in a sense to deliver one line rather than a monologue?” Stern asked. “Like you were a young guy. You wanted to impress all these actors sitting at the table, and they give you one line and it’s your big moment.” Stern asked if it was a “horrible experience.”
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Matt Damon in ‘Mystic Pizza’
“No,” Damon said. He said it took “three nights of shooting” because it was a “big dinner table scene” with “a lot of coverage.” He said, “I just remember being so excited, feeling like I can’t believe that I’m here. All the lights, the crew, the whole thing felt like I knew I was where I wanted to be.”
He added, “I loved everything about it.”
Affleck, 53, said that he agreed with Stern, though. “I’ve seen that clip, I think, and Matt is so much better an actor than that.” He said Damon had a clear “self-consciousness.”
Damon agreed that showing up for a one-day role is “the hardest thing to do” as an actor. “I’ve done cameos and things, and it’s a very, very, very difficult thing to do.”
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Matt Damon on Jan. 12
But then he remembered a time he saw someone do it quite well. He shared that when he and Emily Blunt made 2011’s The Adjustment Bureau, there was an actor who left a major mark. “We were shooting a scene in New York, and we came in, and there was this throwaway part of a maitre’d who sat us, and it got cut out of the movie,” he said.
“But I remember Emily and I went and sat down and this maitre’d walked way, and they cut, and we both looked at each other, and Em goes, ‘That guy’s really f—ing good.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, what the f—? That guy was really good. There was something just incredibly interesting, but real and natural…’ ” Years later, he found out that actor was Pedro Pascal.
“Just his presence, we both recognized it immediately,” Damon said.
Mystic Pizza was a modest success and was one of Roberts’ early breakthroughs. As for Damon, he continued to have small roles — including as an extra in 1989’s Field of Dreams and in 1992’s School Ties — before he and Affleck broke out with 1997’s Good Will Hunting, which they both also wrote. The pair won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the film.
Reflecting on their friendship in a video for Netflix earlier this month, Damon said, “We were both obsessed with [making movies and acting] from an early age which definitely kind of linked us up. But it’s kind of a weird thing in retrospect, because we came from a city where that wasn’t a thing.”
“That wasn’t even an option,” Affleck added about growing up in Cambridge, Mass., just outside Boston. Damon jested, “I guess we were f—ing weird kids.”
Read the original article on People