BOSTON
In an extraordinary show of support for his upcoming movie, Matt Damon took two weeks off from the hit London play he was starring in so he could criss-cross the United States and beat the drums for The Bourne Identity.
"I have a very happy understudy," said Damon earlier this week in a Boston hotel suite of his contract-approved tour for the The Bourne Identity. In this updated reworking of Robert Ludlum's Cold War espionage thriller, Damon plays a man with amnesia who's trying to figure out whether he's a spy or an international terrorist and is not exactly thrilled by either prospect.
In real life, Damon, who grew up in Cambridge and for whom this visit is a sort of homecoming, spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether The Bourne Identity would ever make it out of the starting gate. Plagued by script problems, the picture wound up $8 million over budget and required Damon to return to Paris last February, nearly 10 months after the original production wrapped, to shoot a new ending.
He says he's finally happy with the results and test scores at audience previews have borne this out. Damon seems calm, casual about it all, even though he smokes one Camel filter-tipped cigarette after another, depositing the butts in a crystal goblet for lack of an ashtray in the room.
He's on tour -- from Los Angeles to Chicago to San Francisco to Los Angeles again to Dallas to Boise to Boston to Philadelphia to New York -- because production delays meant that the film missed its late winter release date and landed in the middle of the busy summer pack.
"What's tough is that we're coming out in such a competitive summertime. Because people really seem to like it, I'm going from town to town with the movie under my arm saying, 'Hey, check this one out!' We're about half the budget of some of the other summer movies and the only way to cut out the white noise is to show up in broad daylight."
Damon chuckles when reminded that he'll be up against longtime pal Ben Affleck's hit The Sum of All Fears, another thriller about spies that's based on a best seller, which has been number one at the box office for the past two weeks. "We don't know when these things are going to come out when we do them," he says, "so it's kind of funny that we both ended up in this situation."
Affleck, with whom Damon shares the 1997 original-screenplay Oscar for Good Will Hunting, lives in Los Angeles, while Damon has been based more in Europe the past couple of years. "We see each other as much as we can, though. We talk on the phone. He came over to London to see the play. He had two days off from work and took the Red Eye and had to go back to L.A. the next day, but he wanted to see it."
Damon describes the London production of playwright Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth as a coming-of-age tale set in 1982 on New York's Upper West Side. He plays an "older" friend of 22 of one of the teenagers, who is played by Casey Affleck, Ben's younger brother. Although he's actually 31, Damon chortles over the fact that "because people think I look 25, they're surprised by my age. But I wasn't 19 when we won the Oscar. I didn't start writing that movie when I was 14."
Actually, he had been around for some time, taking acting classes and being an understudy at Robert Brustein's American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge in the spring of 1989. Previously he had studied acting and had established a lasting friendship with playwright David Wheeler and had even had a one-line role in the 1988 film Mystic Pizza.
"He cast me in his play," Damon says of Wheeler, "but Brustein kiboshed it because I wasn't studying at his institute. He wanted institute kids to be in the play. So I understudied the guy they'd chosen who'd promised me a sick out, but then he never sicked out for me."
Damon couldn't remember the name of the young actor he understudied for. No matter. Now Damon has an Oscar, got to throw out the first ball in Monday night's Red Sox game, invited his family to a premiere showing of The Bourne Identity around the corner from his swank hotel and will be back on stage in London this afternoon in This Is Our Youth, which closes tomorrow night.
He's also the narrator of the animated hit Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, which pleased his young nephews no end. "I did that one because it was the first movie I've ever been a part of that my nephews could see," he says. "My younger nephew asked afterwards if he could go behind the glass booth and see me, because he figured that I was up there."
In The Bourne Identity, that really is Damon up there, hanging off the side of an eight-story building. Although he did all his own carefully choreographed fight scenes for the movie, after studying martial arts for five months, "the only time I was really scared was hanging off the side of the building.
"I was on a cable, but you're trusting the guy who's belaying you and you're trusting that the cable won't break and that the harness will hold. And it was a death fall, 80 or 90 feet, plen-ty high for me. And cold. It's like 7 in the morning, it's negative 10 degrees and I'm hanging off the side of this building going, 'I gotta do a kitchen sink drama next. Enough of this stuff!' " And then he laughs.
