Which Movie Stars Could Last Longer on Mars than Matt Damon in 'The Martian'?
Matt Damon with wife Luciana Barroso (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
The Martian was the biggest winner at Tuesday night’s National Board of Review awards, taking home honors for Best Actor (Matt Damon), Best Director (Ridley Scott), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Drew Goddard). In the film, Damon’s astronaut, Mark Watney, finds resourceful and creative ways to stay alive when he is accidentally left behind on Mars. As the stars paraded into NBR’s gala event — a swanky catered setting that could not be more of a polar opposite from a survivalist challenge — we asked them: How long could you survive on Mars? Spoiler alert: Stars are not shy about how fast outer space would kill them.
First we asked the Martian himself, Matt Damon, who in no way shares his character’s ability to survive on a diet of small slivers of potatoes. “I would have lasted maybe eight, nine seconds,” he said. Says his co-star, Jessica Chastain, “If I was actually on the surface of Mars? I would have lasted less than a second.” (Suddenly Damon seems like the marathoner.)
Says Tessa Thompson, who plays Bianca, Adonis’s love interest in Creed, “When I saw The Martian, I thought that I would just die in space. Space movies always convince me that it is a really good thing that that is not my path in life. I think I would have just given up and eaten all of the potatoes.”
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The cast of The Big Short, which won for Best Ensemble, seems more comfortable with Wall Street’s atmosphere than Mars’. Finn Wittrock, who played the young hedge funder Jamey Shipley, confessed, “It would be hard for me to have the patience to grow all of those plants, you know? I’d just want to eat the potatoes and skip the whole growing part.” His co-star, Rafe Spall (who plays Danny Moses, one of Steve Carell’s investment team), brandished his bona fides of outer-space incompetence. “I happened to be in Sir Ridley Scott’s last space movie, Prometheus, so I can tell you exactly how I fared: It wasn’t on Mars, I was on a planet far, far away — and I got deep-throated by an alien snake that killed me.” Added John Magaro (who plays Charlie Geller, Shipley’s partner in their garage-set hedge fund), “If I had to place a bet, I’d say I’d be dead in ten minutes on Mars, probably less.” Hey, that’s about 100 times longer than Damon!
The most confident star seemed to be The Big Short’s Hamish Linklater, who cited his excellent foresight: “I would have survived. I would have brought livestock.” But then up stepped Bill Nye the Science Guy, who seemed sent to the event just to answer this question. But before doing so, he was moved to set some facts straight (as a good Science Guy should). “The premise was that they had potatoes in good enough shape to grow and reproduce, so that’s what he did — but I don’t know that you’d really take potatoes to Mars,” mused Nye. “I think you’d probably bring powdered potatoes to Mars…. [And] the main problem is, the atmospheric pressure on Mars is about .07 percent of the atmospheric pressure on Earth. So the opening sequence, where everything gets blown over, is probably not that accurate. That probably wouldn’t really happen.”
That bit of fact-checking dispensed with, Nye was quick to forgive, saying, “It made a great story. He decides not to die and saves himself with science. The details are not important, in a way.” Great, but come on, Science Guy, out with it: Would you make it on Mars? “If that was the hand I was dealt, oh, sure, I’d be as good as Watley,” he said, but then reconsidered. “No. The guy was a superhero. I would make the same effort that Watney made. But whether or not the actor Matt Damon would make it — I don’t know what kind of outdoorsman Matt Damon is. Maybe I’ll get a chance to talk it over with him tonight.”
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Watch Matt Damon and Ridley Scott talk about turning Jordan into Mars
