Cinema Experts

"I'd had people say, 'You'll enjoy being famous for a week, and you'll never enjoy it again. But I don't think I had that week. I may have been working and missed that moment."
Matthew Paige Damon is an American actor and screenwriter. Damon's first film role came in 1988 with one line in the romantic comedy Mystic Pizza. Damon appeared in small roles before landing a big part in Geronimo: An American Legend with Gene Hackman and Jason Patric. He next appeared as a heroin-addicted soldier in 1996's Courage Under Fire. He was required to lose 40 pounds in 100 days (for only two days of filming). After following a self-prescribed diet and fitness regimen to lose the weight, Damon was advised after the filming that he was fortunate his heart did not shrink. Damon was required to be on medication for several years to correct the stress inflicted on his adrenal gland, but maintains it was worthwhile to properly reflect his character's anguish and to show the industry how committed he was to the role.
Damon and actor Ben Affleck, close personal friends as well as co-stars in several films, developed a thriller about a young math genius, which they pitched around Hollywood. Receiving advice from writer/director/actor Rob Reiner, screenwriter William Goldman, and their friend writer/director Kevin Smith, the two changed the script around to focus on a young math genius trying to make his way in the world. Goldman's only advice was to agree with Reiner in that the script should lose its early thriller focus. This script eventually became Good Will Hunting, which earned both Damon and Affleck Oscars for Best Original Screenplay. Damon was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for the same film (which netted an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for co-star Robin Williams). Damon parodied this as a fictional version of himself in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
Damon has been known to choose a wide variety of film roles, from his portrayal of bisexual murderer Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor, to a fallen angel who discusses pop culture as intellectual subject matter in Dogma, in which he co-starred with Affleck (1999); from a conjoined twin in Stuck on You, to a film he co-wrote with friend Casey Affleck and Gus Van Sant with limited dialogue - the low budget experimental film Gerry. Damon has been part of two major film franchises. He played amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne in the successful action movies The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum and starred as the youthful, optimistic thief, Linus Caldwell, opposite George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts in Steven Soderbergh's remake of the Rat Pack's 1960 caper classic Ocean's Eleven. The successful crime dramedy spawned two sequels: Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen.
Among other high profile roles, Damon played a fictionalized version of Wilhelm Grimm in Terry Gilliam's fantasy adventure The Brothers Grimm and an energy analyst in Syriana. He was recently onscreen in Robert DeNiro's The Good Shepherd as a career CIA agent, and played an undercover mobster working for the Massachusetts State Police in Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong police thriller Infernal Affairs. He also has a supporting role in Kenneth Lonergan's film Margaret.
On Wednesday, July 25, 2007, Damon became the 2,343rd person to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.