Matt Damon revealed he once “fell into a depression” while filming a movie he knew was a “losing effort.”
The “Oppenheimer” actor recalled asking himself, “What have I done?” halfway through shooting a film that wasn’t quite going as he had hoped.
While promoting his latest project, set for release July 21, Damon looked back at a time when he didn’t have full confidence in one particular project during an interview on “Jake’s Takes.”
“I think, without naming any particular movies, that sometimes you find yourself in a movie that you know perhaps might not be what you had hoped it would be and you’re still making it,” the 52-year-old said.
Damon credited his wife, Luciana Barroso, for encouraging him to see the movie through.
“And I remember halfway through production and you’ve still got months to go and you’ve taken your family somewhere, you know, and you’ve inconvenienced them, and I remember my wife pulling me up because I fell into a depression about like, what have I done?”
“She just said, ‘We’re here now’,” he went on. “You know, and it was like…I do pride myself, in a large part because of her, at being a professional actor and what being a professional actor means is you go and you do the 15-hour day and give it absolutely everything, even in what you know is going to be a losing effort.”
“And if you can do that with the best possible attitude, then you’re a pro, and she really helped me with that,” he added.
While the Oscar winner didn’t name the movie in question, he previously opened up about a past project he was convinced was going to be a flop.
Speaking about the 2016 film “The Great Wall,” which received a woeful 35% on Rotten Tomatoes, Damon likened the film to a disaster.
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The movie didn’t generate over $50 million mark in the US after production forked out $150 million on it.
“I was like, this is exactly how disasters happen,” Damon said of the film on the “WTF” podcast in 2021. “It doesn’t cohere. It doesn’t work as a movie.”
“I came to consider that the definition of a professional actor; knowing you’re in a turkey and going, ‘OK, I’ve got four more months. It’s the up at dawn siege on Hamburger Hill. I am definitely going to die here, but I’m doing it.’ That’s as s–tty as you can feel creatively, I think. I hope to never have that feeling again,” he added.
