There are certain movie stars who have "It" the second they walk in front of a camera. It might not happen for them immediately, but all casting directors and filmmakers had to do was watch a minute or two of Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, or Paul Newman to know that they'd be topping marquees and posters for decades to come. For Gen X-ers, the same could be said of Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, and Halle Berry. For Millennials and Zoomers, you've got Michael B. Jordan,
Florence Pugh, Glen Powell, and Sydney Sweeney.
Some future movie stars don't pop like this. They need seasoning and, most importantly, the right role to demonstrate that they're capable of carrying a movie. I don't think anyone envisioned Gene Hackman as a leading man until they saw him whoop it up as Buck Barrow in "Bonnie and Clyde," nor was Renée Zellweger a cinch for stardom prior to her incandescent performance in "Jerry Maguire" (for which she wasn't even nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but that's another outrage for another time).
Matt Damon was another show-me star.
It's to his credit that I remembered him from his small part in "Mystic Pizza" when I saw him play the antisemitic antagonist of "School Ties," and he was impressive in Walter Hill's "Geronimo: An American Legend" if only because he held his own with the powerhouse likes of Hackman, Wes Studi, Robert Duvall, and Jason Patric. He still had a babyface, but he exuded confidence. Like any aspiring actor, he knew he belonged. He just had to prove his worthiness to the folks who did the casting. To do so, Damon took on a role in a great Denzel Washington war movie that nearly killed him.
Read more: 15 Best Movies Without An Oscar
Matt Damon Nearly Killed Himself To Pull Off His Character In Courage Under Fire
Director Edward Zwick knew from launching movie stars. He caught Denzel Washington at the right time when he cast him as the slave-turned-soldier Trip in "Glory," and made Brad Pitt's stardom official with the unabashedly melodramatic Western epic "Legends of the Fall." Two years after scoring a box office hit with the latter, he took on the prestige Gulf War drama "Courage Under Fire," which came attached with two of the biggest stars in Hollywood at the time, Washington and Meg Ryan. Written by Vietnam War veteran Patrick Sheane Duncan, the film was a "Rashomon"-esque account of a Gulf War firefight in which Ryan's Medevac captain is believed to have died honorably. Washington's character is tasked with determining if her actions were worthy of her becoming the first woman recipient of the Medal of Honor.
Washington receives conflicting accounts from members of Ryan's crew, but finally uncovers the truth when he interviews Damon's haunted Andrew Ilario. Ilario has worn himself down to a nub via heroin addiction, but is able to accurately recount what went down during the operation. It's an incredibly powerful scene, primarily because Damon looks like a human skeleton.
In a 2016 Reddit AMA, Damon wrote the following about his preparation for the scene:
"I weighed 139 pounds in that movie, and that is not a natural weight for me and not a happy weight for me even when I was 25. I had to run about 13 miles a day which wasn't even the hard part. The hard part was the diet, all I ate was chicken breast. It's not like I had a chef or anything, I just made it up and did what I thought I had to do. I just made it up and that was incredibly challenging."
Damon once told Charlie Rose that he nearly killed himself to nail this scene, which he considered a "business decision." As he said to Vanity Fair in 1997, "I thought, 'Nobody will take this role, because it's too small.' I was sick of reading scripts that [his 'School Ties' co-star] Chris O'Donnell had passed on, and I was looking for something to set me apart: 'Look what I'll do, I'll kill myself!' Directors took note of it."
Damon had to wait a year for this performance to bear fruit, but he had to be thrilled when the director who took note of his physical sacrifice was Francis Ford Coppola. While Damon is terrific in Coppola's "The Rainmaker," he'd already made his own luck by co-writing (with Ben Affleck) and starring in "Good Will Hunting." From that point forward, Chris O'Donnell was getting the scripts he passed on. And you'll see him next on the big screen as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey."
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