Matt Damon's 1 Couples Therapy Loophole Led To His Role In 'Oppenheimer'
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Matt Damon said he made sure there was “one caveat” when he agreed to a brief acting break during couples therapy with wife Luciana Barroso.
The Oscar winner revealed in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly that he ended up in “Oppenheimer” after he “negotiated” a loophole that would let him work with director Christopher Nolan.
“This is going to sound made up, but it’s actually true,” Damon told the filmmaker and co-stars Emily Blunt and Robert Downey Jr., in a conversation that occurred before screen actors with SAG-AFTRA walked out on strike (actors with the union are not currently promoting their films). “I had — not to get too personal — negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off.”
“I had been in ‘Interstellar’ and then [Nolan] put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation,” he said, referring to their 2014 sci-fi collaboration.
Matt Damon and his wife, Luciana Barroso, attend opening night of the play "Prima Facie" on Broadway on April 23, 2023.
“But I actually negotiated in couples therapy — this is a true story — the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called,” Damon said.
“This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you,” he explained. “He just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household.”
It appeared like he reached an agreement with his wife of 17 years in 2021, after Nolan recruited Damon to play Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project. Groves oversaw scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, during the creation of the atomic bomb in the 1940s.
Despite his supposed break, Damon has stayed quite busy in the past few years. Earlier this year he produced and starred in the Nike sneaker origin story “Air,” and he had two major releases, “Stillwater” and Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel,” in 2021.
“Oppenheimer” comes out in theaters on Friday, July 21.
TV and film writers and actors, including those who worked on “Oppenheimer,” are on strike over fair pay and working conditions in the streaming era.
