Matt Damon has been a fixture in Hollywood for the last 35 years. Before his break-out as co-writer and star of Good Will Hunting in 1997, he was on the heartthrob track of most young actors, usually cast as a romantic lead in fairly forgettable films. After his big Oscar win for best original screenplay for Good Will Hunting (shared with co-writer/childhood BFF Ben Affleck), Damon suddenly began to garner more meaty and interesting roles, including a lengthy list of historical flicks, with several becoming massive box-office successes and cementing his place on the Hollywood A-List for life. So, let’s take a trip down memory lane and revisit some of Matt Damon’s historical film and TV roles!
School Ties (1992)
Geronimo: An American Legend (1993)
The Good Old Boys (1995)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000)
All the Pretty Horses (2000)
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)
The Brothers Grimm (2005)
The Good Shepherd (2006)
Che (2008)
True Grit (2010)
Behind the Candelabra (2013)
The Monuments Men (2014)
The Great Wall (2016)
Suburbicon (2017)
Ford v Ferrari (2019)
No Sudden Move (2019)
The Last Duel (2021)
Oppenheimer (2023)
Do you have a favorite Matt Damon flick? Share it with us in the comments!
Mr Damon isn’t really on my ‘Watch list’ but I’ve enjoyed at least some of his work – TRUE GRIT, FORD VS FERRARI and THE LAT DUEL come to mind – so credit where it’s due.
It seems that most of my favorite Matt Damon movies are not Frock Flicks- The Martian, Air, Dogma- but I loved Ford vs Ferrari. :)
Too many cowboy roles, although I also liked True Grit a lot. But like with Leo DiCaprio, I think I like him best in Midcentury frock flicks.
He’s in the upcoming Odyssey film as King Odyssus, we’ll see how good he is!
Odysseus.
According to Wikipedia, The Great Wall is set during the reign of the Song Emperor Renzong (1022-1063), so a bit more precise than just “the Middle Ages”, but it’s definitely historical fantasy, with the colourful Chinese military armour/uniforms, weapons etc. probably not being period-accurate. (I mean, they have squads of women bungee jumping off the Great Wall, which is massively higher than in real life, to slash up alien lizards.) Maybe not quite as inaccurate as Arthurian films which portray 6th-century British warlords in late medieval/early Renaissance plate armour, though…