Matt Damon Turns Career Around

10 March 2010

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Matt Damon can currently do no wrong on the big screen, his last role in Invictus earnt him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, and he is one of the biggest names in Hollywood.

He is back on the big screen this week as he reunites with Paul Greengrass to return to the war movie genre in Green Zone.

But it has taken many years of hard graft, and sometimes really rubbish roles, for the actor to find himself where he is today.

Damon shot to fame in 1997, along with his best mate Ben Affleck, as they penned and starred in Good Will Hunting. They went on to win a Best Screenplay Oscar for their work and Damon was also nominated for Best Actor.

And while Affleck's career took off Damon did get somewhat left behind as his success was steady rather than instant.

By the late nineties Damon was best known for roles in Saving Private Ryan and The Talented Mr. Ripley, the latter for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe.

Into the noughties and roles in Dogma and The Legend of Bagger Vance followed but it wasn't long before his fortunes were about to change, and it was all thanks to a certain franchise.

Yes it's amazing what a franchise does for a career! And first up was Ocean's Eleven, probably just planned as a single movie, which teamed him up with Hollywood heavy weights George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

A re-make of the 1060 Rat Pack movie Ocean's Eleven was a huge critical and commercial hit and Damon would return to the role of Linus twice more as the franchise enjoyed varying degrees of success.

But it would be the role of amnesiac Jason Bourne that really kicked stared his career back in 2002.

The spy film, an adaptation of the Robert Ludlum novel of the same name, was directed by Doug Liman and the script penned by Tony Gilroy.

The Bourne Identity was well met by the critics and it went on to gross over $214 million at the global box office, a cinema icon had been born.

With very little success at after that, how awful was Ocean's Twelve? He returned to the role of Bourne in 2004 as Paul Greengrass took over the reigns of the project.

Tony Gilroy was back to pen the script and Doug Liman was still on board as producer and the movie did better than it's predecessor at the box office.

With The Bourne Supremacy Damon proved that he was a top quality leading man and the roles that he was offered began to change.

He teamed up with Clooney once again for political thriller Syriana before moving onto the Robert De Niro directed picture The Good Shepherd.

It was a change of pace again in 2006 as he took on the crime film as he joined an impressive line-up for Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Jack Nicholson and Alec Baldwin for Martin Scorsese's The Departed.

The movie was a critical and commercial hit as it went on win the Best Picture Oscar and bag Scorsese his first Best Director Academy Award.

A second Bourne movie with filmmaker Greengrass, The Bourne Ultimatum, cemented Damon as a real action hero as it was the best movie of the franchise.

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