Matt Damon still can’t shake one haunting moment from The Odyssey set
Matt Damon cringes at a rookie mistake from The Odyssey set: he was the lone star who had wardrobe lug his armor while everyone else carried their own.
Matt Damon had a very Hollywood problem on day one of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, and it smacked him with a little perspective. Short version: he hiked to set feeling like a champ, then realized someone else was hauling his armor. Not a great look, and he knew it.
The hill, the armor, and the 'oh no' moment
While promoting Nolan's epic on The Sara Cox Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2, Damon said the first shoot was in a cave in Greece. To get there, the entire production had to grind through a 20–25 minute uphill hike. Damon did it unencumbered, as you do when you assume it's a big-budget set and the machine takes care of the heavy stuff.
Then he looked back down the trail.
'And then I saw the guy handling my wardrobe, Corey, coming up the hill carrying my armor. I felt awful.'
It got worse: the rest of the supporting cast, playing his character's crew, showed up having worn their own heavy gear for the trek specifically so the wardrobe team wouldn't have to schlep it. Damon apologized to Corey on the spot and told him it would not happen again. The star perks-vs-crew reality check landed hard, and to his credit, he owned it.
The home front is even tougher
If the crew can humble you, your kids will finish the job. On Marc Maron's podcast, Damon explained that his daughter is basically his in-house critic. She dodges the movies she suspects might actually be good and saves her commentary for the ones that whiff.
'She just likes giving me shit. She's playfully hard on me. She doesn't go to see my movies on purpose, the ones she thinks might be good. She crushes me on the ones that don't work.'
Exhibit A is his 2016 fantasy The Great Wall. In classic teen savage mode, she clipped the title to The Wall because, in her words, there was 'nothing great about it.' Damon said he knew during production that the film was in trouble as studio pressure pulled it in different directions, and living through that was rough.
Why this sticks
Between the cave hike and the dinner-table roasts, Damon keeps airing the stuff most actors pretend doesn't happen. Whether it's apologizing to the guy carrying his armor or laughing at a movie that missed, that kind of candor is why people keep showing up for him onscreen.