Matt Damon slimmed down to ‘high school weight’ for The Odyssey
The Bourne Identity actor Matt Damon shared that he “lost a lot of weight” to play heroic king Odysseus, who embarks on a voyage after the Trojan War.
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Matt Damon needed to find work as a bartender in the late 1990s to ensure his Tennessee accent was as accurate as possible for one of his first major movie roles. It was a chance to figure out how to look natural behind the bar before filming started and listen for specific pronunciations to replicate.
He chose Knoxville as the city to do it in.
After Damon mentioned his month in Knoxville in a recent interview with GQ, locals took to social media threads to guess what bar he could be talking about. Some guessed Patrick Sullivan’s (now known as Lonesome Dove), Ivy’s on the Strip, somewhere near what’s now University Liquors, as well as Out of Bounds or Old College Inn.
Damon’s representative Jennifer Allen told Knox News the superstar, sadly, doesn’t recall the specifics.
“I just spoke with Matt. He doesn’t remember the name of the bar. He remembers that it was in a hotel − he said maybe a Comfort Inn. He said the bar was on the main street, and they only served Bud and Bud Lite. Nothing else. He said it was always mobbed,” the email said.
Damon described the scene in his GQ interview.
“I moved to Knoxville, and I just told the manager, this woman, I just told her what I was doing. It was an extra bartender for her at no charge, right,” Damon said to his “The Odyssey” co-stars Robert Pattison and Tom Holland in the video. “I was like, ‘I’ll give all my tips to these guys, and I just need to be here.'”
The mystery took off online among University of Tennessee grads and those who lived in town at the time.
“I am cracking up at all the comments because evidently he worked at every bar and kitchen on the Strip and near Central!” one Facebook user commented.
One lucky person has picture proof that Damon’s story is legit.
“Unless he worked at several places, it was the bar in the bottom level of Campus Inn (now Peyton Manning’s The Graduate). He was incredibly kind,” Facebook user Jenny Walker Weldon commented. She posted a photo of her with Damon in his “Good Will Hunting” era.
The role he was preparing for was Rudy Baylor in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1997 film “The Rainmaker.”
Did Matt Damon ever serve you a drink in Knoxville? Let us know!
Knox News reporter Joanna Hayes covers restaurants and retail for the business growth and development team. Email: joanna.hayes@knoxnews.com; Instagram: @knoxeat65. Sign up for Joanna’s Eat65 email newsletter to get the latest drink and dining news, as well as restaurant recommendations, at knoxnews.com/newsletters.
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