- Matt Damon told his wife that he would take a break from acting unless “Chris Nolan called.”
- The actor recalled the promise he made during an Entertainment Weekly interview with his “Oppenheimer” castmates.
- Damon added that he “had the foresight” to make the request without even knowing if Nolan was working on a new film.
Matt Damon promised his wife during couples therapy that he would take time off acting — unless Christopher Nolan called.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly alongside Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., and the “Oppenheimer” director himself, Damon said he “had enough foresight” to tell his wife that the only exception to his hiatus would be working on a Nolan film.
“I had been in ‘Interstellar,’ and then Chris put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation,” Damon said. “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.”
The 52-year-old actor added that he made the request without even knowing whether or not the filmmaker was working on anything new, “because he never tells you.”
“Like with Cillian, he just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household,” Damon said.
The actor ended up getting the role of General Leslie Groves, the military officer who oversaw the Manhattan Project, in Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.“
The film, which stars Murphy in the titular role, is a historical drama that tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer — an American theoretical physicist who’s also known as the father of the atomic bomb.
Prior to “Oppenheimer,” both Murphy and Damon worked with Nolan in his previous films. Murphy has starred in six of Nolan’s films to date, including “The Dark Knight Trilogy,” while Damon played a supporting role in 2014’s “Interstellar.”
“Oppenheimer” opens in cinemas on Friday, July 21.
