After appearing in three movies in 2021, Matt Damon needed a break from acting. While in couples therapy with his wife, Luciana, Damon agreed to take some time off with one important caveat: if Christopher Nolan called, Damon would answer. As fate would have it, Nolan offered Damon a role in Oppenheimer, causing the actor to invoke his special clause from therapy.
“This is going to sound made up, but it’s actually true,” Damon said during Entertainment Weekly’s Around the Table. “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 Chris put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation, 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. This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you. He just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household.”
Damon famously appeared in Nolan’s Interstellar as Dr. Mann, the astronaut who attempts to murder Cooper and escape his frozen world so he can repopulate humanity on a new planet using fertilized eggs.
Who is Involved in Oppenheimer?
Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who aided in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II. Oppenheimer marks the sixth collaboration between Murphy and Nolan. Damon plays Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project. Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., and Florence Pugh star alongside Murphy and Damon.
“Oppenheimer is an IMAX-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it,” the official logline reads.
Based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer is written and directed by Nolan, who will produce alongside Emma Thomas and Charles Roven. Oppenheimer arrives in theaters on July 21.
