1. Matthew Paige Damon is an American actor, film producer, and screenwriter.
71 Facts About Matt Damon
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Matt Damon was ranked among Forbes most bankable stars in 2007, and in 2010 was one of the highest-grossing actors of all time.
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Matt Damon has received various awards and nominations, including an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for three British Academy Film Awards and seven Primetime Emmy Awards.
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Matt Damon established himself as a leading man by starring as Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr Ripley, Jason Bourne in the Bourne franchise, and Linus Caldwell in the Ocean's trilogy.
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Matt Damon received a nomination for an Academy Award and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for playing an astronaut stranded on Mars in The Martian.
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On television, Matt Damon portrayed Scott Thorson in the HBO biopic Behind the Candelabra, for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award.
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Matt Damon was Emmy-nominated for his guest role in 30 Rock in 2011 and hosting Saturday Night Live in 2019.
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Matt Damon produced the reality series Project Greenlight as well as the film Manchester by the Sea.
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Matt Damon has performed voice-over work in both animated and documentary films as well as established two production companies with Affleck, Artists Equity, and the former, Pearl Street Films.
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Matt Damon has been involved in charitable work with organizations including the One Campaign, H2O Africa Foundation, Feeding America, and Water.
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Matthew Paige Damon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 8,1970, the second son of Kent Telfer Damon, a stockbroker, and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an early childhood education professor at Lesley University.
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Matt Damon's father had English and Scottish ancestry, while his mother is of Finnish and Swedish descent; her family surname had been changed from Pajari to Paige.
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Matt Damon's parents divorced when he was two years old, and he and his brother returned with their mother to Cambridge, where they lived in a six-family communal house.
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Matt Damon has said that, as a teenager, he had felt lonely, as if he did not belong, and that his mother's by-the-book approach to child-rearing had made it hard for him to define his own identity.
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Matt Damon attended Cambridge Alternative School and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, and was a good student.
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Matt Damon acted in several high-school theater productions, and has credited his drama teacher, Gerry Speca, as having had an important artistic influence on him, although noting wryly that Speca had given Ben Affleck the "biggest roles and longest speeches".
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Matt Damon attended Harvard University as a member of the class of 1992, residing in Lowell House, but left before receiving his degree to take a lead role in the film Geronimo: An American Legend.
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At Harvard, Matt Damon was a member of the Delphic Club, one of the university's elite Final Clubs.
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Matt Damon left the school in 1992, a semester shy of completing his Bachelor of Arts in English to feature in Geronimo: An American Legend in Los Angeles, erroneously expecting the movie to become a big success.
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Matt Damon asked Affleck to perform the scenes with him in front of the class and, when Damon later moved into Affleck's Los Angeles apartment, they began working on the script more seriously.
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Matt Damon co-starred with Edward Norton in the 1998 poker film Rounders, where he plays a reformed gambler in law school who must return to playing high-stakes poker to help a friend pay off loan sharks.
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Matt Damon then portrayed antihero Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr Ripley, a role for which he lost 11 kilograms.
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Matt Damon said that he wanted to display his character's humanity and honesty on screen despite his criminal actions.
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Matt Damon co-starred as thief Linus Caldwell in the former's first installment, Steven Soderbergh's 2001 ensemble film Ocean's Eleven, a remake of the Rat Pack's Ocean's 11.
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Matt Damon later said that he and Affleck felt proud that the show helped launch the careers of several directors; Matt Damon later served as the executive producer of a number of projects directed by the winners of the show.
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Matt Damon began 2002 with writing and starring in Gerry, a drama about two friends who forget to bring water and food when they go hiking in a desert.
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Matt Damon then played amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne in Doug Liman's action thriller The Bourne Identity.
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Matt Damon insisted on performing many of the stunts himself, undergoing three months of extensive training in stunt work, the use of weapons, boxing, and eskrima.
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Matt Damon said that before The Bourne Identity he was jobless for six months, and many of his films during that period under-performed at the box-office.
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Matt Damon doubted the film's financial prospects, but it proved a commercial success.
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Matt Damon voiced the role of Spirit in the animated film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and later played a conjoined twin in Stuck on You, which received a mixed critical reception.
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Matt Damon says starring in the film broadened his understanding of the oil industry and that he hoped the people would talk about the film afterward.
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In 2006, Matt Damon joined Robert De Niro in The Good Shepherd as a career CIA agent, and played an undercover mobster working for the Massachusetts State Police in Martin Scorsese's The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong police thriller Infernal Affairs.
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Matt Damon had an uncredited cameo in Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth and another cameo in the 2008 Che Guevara biopic Che.
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Matt Damon made a guest appearance in 2009 on the sixth-season finale of Entourage as himself, where he tries to pressure Vincent Chase into donating to his real foundation ONEXONE.
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Matt Damon appeared as a guest star in an episode of Arthur, titled "The Making of Arthur", as himself.
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Matt Damon narrated Inside Job, a documentary film about the effects of financial deregulation in the 2008 financial crisis.
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In January 2012, Matt Damon signed a multiyear deal to be the voice of TD Ameritrade advertisements, replacing Sam Waterston as the discount brokerage's spokesman.
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Matt Damon starred in the science fiction film Elysium, where he played former car-thief-turned-factory-worker Max DeCosta.
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Matt Damon appeared in the science fiction movie The Zero Theorem in 2013, directed by Terry Gilliam.
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That same year, Matt Damon appeared in a 20-second advertisement for Nespresso, directed by Grant Heslov, with whom he worked on The Monuments Men.
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Matt Damon provided voice-over for United Airlines' resurrected "Fly the Friendly Skies" advertisement campaign in 2013.
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That same year, Matt Damon appeared as a celebrity correspondent for Years of Living Dangerously.
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In 2017, Matt Damon played the lead role in Zhang Yimou's The Great Wall, a hit internationally and a disappointment at the domestic box office.
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The film, and Matt Damon's casting, were not well received by critics.
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In 2019, Matt Damon portrayed Carroll Shelby in the action biographical drama Ford v Ferrari, directed by James Mangold.
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In 2021, Matt Damon starred in Tom McCarthy's crime drama Stillwater, playing an unemployed oil rig worker from Oklahoma who sets out with a French woman to prove his convicted daughter's innocence.
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In 2023, Matt Damon starred as Nike executive Sonny Vaccaro in Air, a drama film about the launch of Air Jordan, co-starring and directed by Affleck.
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Matt Damon received praise for the role, earning a nomination for a Golden Globe Award.
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Matt Damon reunited with Christopher Nolan in the biographical film Oppenheimer, playing Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project.
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The film was a critical and commercial success, becoming Matt Damon's highest grossing movie.
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In 2024, Matt Damon starred in and produced The Instigators, alongside Casey Affleck, for Apple TV+.
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Matt Damon has appeared in their print and television advertising.
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Matt Damon is an ambassador for ONEXONE, a nonprofit foundation committed to supporting, preserving, and improving the lives of children at home in Canada, the United States, and around the world.
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Matt Damon is a spokesperson for Feeding America, a hunger-relief organization, and a member of their Entertainment Council, participating in their Ad Council public service announcements.
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Matt Damon is a board member of Tonic Mailstopper, a company that attempts to halt junk mail delivered to American homes each day.
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Matt Damon was the founder of the H2O Africa Foundation, the charitable arm of the Running the Sahara expedition, which merged with WaterPartners to create Water.
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Matt Damon has been part of promoting those efforts, tying in with the Aquafina and Ethos Water brands of bottled water owned by PepsiCo and Starbucks.
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Since 2015, Matt Damon has promoted Anheuser-Busch InBev's Stella Artois beer brand as a Water.
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On January 24,2013, Matt Damon took over his show and mentioned the long-standing feud and having been bumped from years of shows.
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Matt Damon met his Argentine wife, Luciana Bozan, while filming Stuck on You in Miami in April 2003.
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Matt Damon has a stepdaughter Alexia Barroso was born on 1998 and from Bozan's previous marriage, and considers her to be his own.
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In 2018, Matt Damon bought a luxury penthouse in New York City's Brooklyn Heights neighborhood for $16.5 million.
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Matt Damon has competed in several World Series of Poker events, including the 2010 World Series of Poker main event.
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Matt Damon was eliminated from the 1998 WSOP by poker professional Doyle Brunson.
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Matt Damon is a supporter of the Democratic Party and has made several critical attacks on Republican Party figures.
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Matt Damon had a working relationship with the Obama administration, primarily due to his friendship with Jason Furman, his former Harvard roommate who became Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to Obama.
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In 2012, Matt Damon joined Ben Affleck and John Krasinski in hosting a fundraiser for Democratic Senate nominee Elizabeth Warren.
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However, Matt Damon clarified later that the calls were solely to reassure her of Lombardo's professional qualifications in the film industry.
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Also during this time, Matt Damon said that he had heard a story from Ben Affleck that Gwyneth Paltrow, a co-worker on a feature film of his, had been harassed by Weinstein in 1996, but thought "she had handled it" because they continued to work together, and Weinstein "treated her incredibly respectfully".
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On January 17,2018, Matt Damon apologized on The Today Show for his social commentary, stating that he "should get in the back seat and close [his] mouth for a while".