The Making of a Star

The Telegraph. Saturday 24 January 1998.

Matt Damon is Hollywood's most talked about young actor. The praise is deserved, but will the hype hinder his progress? MATT Damon. The name won't mean much to you right now, unless you happen to work in the movie industry, or take a particularly close interest in forthcoming films. You may just remember a young soldier in last year's 'Courage Under Fire', gaunt and glaring, harrowed by war to the point of heroin addiction. That was Matt Damon. Or it's just conceivable that you'll recall a fascistic bully in a film called 'School Ties', though it went straight to video in the UK. That was Matt Damon too. But in three months' time you won't need a Trivial Pursuit master's knowledge of movies to have heard of Matt Damon. The chances are you will have read so many articles about Matt Damon that you'll feel qualified to write one yourself.

For Matt Damon has been designated Hollywood's Next Big Thing. This is an annual rite. Last year's NBT was Edward Norton, the year before's NBT was Matthew McConaughey. And now, in America, Damon is in mid-coronation. His breakthrough performance in Francis Coppola's 'The Rainmaker', a superior John Grisham adaptation, received high acclaim. Now Damon, 27, is garnering even greater plaudits for his lead performance in 'Good Will Hunting', a film he also co-wrote with his boyhood best friend, Ben Affleck ('Chasing Amy'), and which is being talked of as an Oscar contender. If this were not enough, next summer Damon will be seen in the title role of Steven Spielberg's 'Saving Private Ryan'.

'The making by Hollywood of Matt Damon, the Star, is as deliberate as the crafting of Bill Clinton, the Candidate, or Stella Tennant, the Supermodel," someone wrote in the Washington Post recently. They were reacting to one of the most awesome publicity campaigns in American movie history. Over the past two or three months Matt Damon - his face, his thoughts, his history - has been everywhere: in glossy magazines, in movie periodicals, in newspapers, on primetime television. The story of Damon's Boston childhood, his friendship with Affleck, their writing of 'Good Will Hunting' and their insistence that, like Sylvester Stallone with 'Rocky', they would star in their film, have through repetition acquired the aura of myth.

The origin of all this frenzy was a cover story about Damon in November's US edition of Vanity Fair. The editor had been sent a video of scenes from Damon's forthcoming films and put into motion a process that has become as programmatic as it is influential. McConaughey was Vanity Fair's cover boy in the same month two years earlier. Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Ralph Fiennes are other recent inductees. And the story always reads the same. There are the lofty comparisons with film greats (usually Marlon Brando, James Dean and Montgomery Clift), the writer's surprise that the interviewee is a regular guy (there is repeated emphasis in the Vanity Fair Damon article on the fact that he drinks beer) - and then the photo-shoot.

Oh yes, those photos. It seems to be a condition of this breakthrough coverage that the new star pose as ridiculously as possible. With their air of ritual humiliation, these photo-spreads resemble those bizarre debagging ceremonies indulged in by university dining societies when initiating a new member: high on the drug of acceptance, the novice will undergo any debasement. In Vanity Fair Damon posed in morning suit, a top hat jauntily atilt on his head and his trousers undone to reveal boxer shorts and a red rose perched on his flies. There was also a shot of him grinning in a silk dressing-gown and flip-flops, balancing a cup and saucer on his head.

The Vanity Fair article was followed by a stampede of other pieces and pictures. Damon comes over as warm and intelligent, his generosity bordering on gush (in one interview he described both Francis Coppola and 'Good Will Hunting's director, Gus Van Sant, as "a genius"). Damon publicists - 'Good Will Hunting' is being handled by the masters, Miramax - are hardly to blame for this blanket coverage. It is more a commentary on lemming-like journalism. Joel Schumacher has described inviting a few journalists to see an early screening of his 'A Time to Kill' to attract a little publicity, and watching the McConaughey feeding frenzy begin. A mediocre film, an average performance - but enough for the star-makers.

It would be neat at this point to conclude that Damon is a media creation. But he is not. Judging by his first two starring roles, Damon is very good - potentially even great. Playing a young lawyer who stands up to a big insurance firm in Coppola's 'The Rainmaker' (released here next month), Damon displays the full force of his talent and charm. With his fresh face, but firm drawl and stocky frame, he pulls off a rare double act: he is sensitive at the same time as solid, sweet as well as macho - both an aesthete and a hearty. His appeal could be unlimited. The toothy features are of a less streamlined Tom Cruise, as if the cockiness had been flattened away.

In 'Good Will Hunting' it is Damon's writing as much as his acting that impresses. The film is about how a janitor (played by Damon) working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology turns out to be a mathematical genius, and the battle of wills between him and the psychiatrist (Robin Williams) assigned to him when he gets into trouble with the law. It is an uneven piece of work, but rich with the flavour of south Boston male camaraderie, and scenes between Damon and his mates are full of sharp, authentic dialogue. The film also has an impressive intellectual scope, eager to explore ideas about identity and environment, intuition and insight, knowledge and experience. Damon's Will Hunting hides his terror at his destiny under a mask of bravado.

But here 'Good Will Hunting' hits a problem. For all the skill of his acting, Damon never seemed quite dangerous or deranged enough for Will. And we find our response to him in some respects conditioned by the media coverage of him. The Matt Damon of the profiles is a profoundly together, rounded young man, and in an odd way the power of that image prevents us from believing in Will's turmoil. Similarly, our knowledge of Matt's background, as the son of a radical liberal professor, begins to invade our understanding of Will Hunting. Will Hunting comes to seem a little like a middle-class fantasy of a working-class hero. In other words, our knowing so much about Damon interferes with his art.

The problems of over-exposure work both ways. How will Damon, as actor and writer, continue shrewdly to observe the world now that it crowds around him? A cartoon in last week's New Yorker magazine showed a teacher instructing her kids: "There are exceptions. Sometimes it's possible to have buzz without any hype whatsoever." It's true, but it's possible for buzz to be justified and still be hype. Damon deserves all the praise he's receiving, but that doesn't mean it's a help to him - or us. "What happens in a consumer society is that people become objects of attention in a way that doesn't seem healthy to society," an academic explained to Vanity Fair. The lady should know. She is Matt Damon's mother.