Matt Damon Was Considering Taking A Break From Acting Until Chris Nolan Called For Oppenheimer

Actor Matt Damon was planning to take a break from acting, but then Christopher Nolan called and offered him a role in his new movie, Oppenheimer. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Damon said he and his wife agreed in couples therapy that he would take time off from acting–with one exception. Should Nolan come calling, Damon would be able to break his agreement and return to acting, and that’s exactly what happened.

“I had negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off. I had been in Interstellar, then Chris put me on ice for a couple movies. I actually negotiated in couples therapy that the one caveat to me taking time off was if Chris Nolan called,” Damon said. “This was without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you.”

Damon plays US Army general Leslie Groves, one of the men in charge of the Manhattan Project and the creation of the first atomic bomb in the 1940s.

Also in the interview, Robert Downey Jr., who plays Lewis Strauss, shared an anecdote about reading the Oppenheimer script for the first time. He said he went to Nolan’s home to read the script, which was printed in black on red paper. This made it difficult to read, Downey Jr. said, and it might have been intentional. The actor said text printed in black on red paper is meant to make it difficult to remember.

Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the chief theoretical physicist who helped lead the team that created the world’s first atomic bomb. It is Nolan’s first film since 2020’s Tenet.

In other news, Nolan recently said he will not make another superhero movie but didn’t say one way or another about if he would want to make a Star Wars movie one day.