![]() ![]() ![]() As both a performer and a public figure, he’s a type we’ve seen plenty of times: the regular guy, an All-American, the nice fella who could live next door. Instead, Damon the man can almost disappear. ![]() The lesson, Damon explained - dressed on this day, as he was each time we talked over several weeks this spring, in a pale shirt and wearing a tatty string bracelet that one of his daughters had woven for him - “was that Jack started with something we’ve seen plenty of times and kept trying to make it as good and as interesting as it could possibly be.”ĭamon has learned that lesson well, though he expresses it in a very different way from Nicholson, who no matter the part always conveys an innate Jackness. Scorsese wound up cutting almost all of Nicholson’s jazz. “I was like, ‘Yep, it is, it’s pretty awful,”’ Damon said, his voice cracking as he relived his squeamishness. That’s not what I did.’”ĭamon smiled, showing his big, bright teeth (his physical feature that is most undeniably a star’s), as he described Nicholson’s filigrees becoming increasingly macabre, adding, for example, intimations of necrophilia and then punctuating each with “Now, that’s sinister” to make sure his young co-star caught his drift. Costello executes a guy in a marsh? We’ve seen that kind of scene in movies before. “Jack looked at that scene” - and, truly, it was almost startling how well Damon captured Nicholson’s disquieting energy - “and he goes: ‘What I did was I made the person being executed a woman. He was recalling the older actor’s talking about reworking a scene in which his character, the Boston gangster Frank Costello, is supposed to murder a man in a marsh. It was early May, and he was speaking via Zoom from a sparsely appointed, sun-splashed room in a rented house in Sydney, Australia, telling a story about working with Jack Nicholson on Martin Scorsese’s 2006 dirty-cops-and-criminals epic, “The Departed.” “The scene was an eighth of a page,” Damon said, arching his eyebrows devilishly and adopting Jack’s insinuating vocal tones. “There’s a great lesson here for an actor,’ Matt Damon said, a dusting of gray in his short hair and thin goatee, fine age lines around his pale blue eyes. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |