If there is one man the entire planet could agree on saving, it’s probably Matt Damon. The star becomes The Martian in Ridley Scott’s hyper-realistic sci-fi space drama, which follows a team of astronauts on a mission to Mars. When a wind storm on the Red Planet threatens their lives, the NASA team (Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Michael Peña, Aksel Hennie and Sebastian Stan) flees, believing their colleague, botanist/astronaut Mark Watney (Damon), to be dead.
But he’s very much alive. And as the lone human on Mars during The Martian’s 141 minutes, he’s very much alone.
With no one to play off of in the movie, set just slightly in the future, “I just rehearsed in my house, basically,” Damon says. “By the time I showed up [on the set], I had the entire script committed to memory just from having done it so many hundreds of times. The first day we shot I did the first monologue, it’s like a couple of pages, and Ridley said ‘cut!’ He just looked at me and goes, ‘We should do two movies at once.’ ”
In person, “he’s so charming, he’s so funny,” Chastain says. “It’s like yes, I believe the entire world would come together to rescue Matt Damon.”
The Martian, shot partially in Jordan’s red desert, was adapted by Drew Goddard (World War Z, Lost) from Andy Weir’s self-published e-book, which gained a cult following and became a 2014 best-seller.
Praised as a story loaded with math and proven science (it was even fact-checked by NASA), The Martian hinges on one astronaut’s ingenuity as he stretches 60 days of supplies on a hostile planet into enough to sustain him until a rescue mission (co-ordinated by Jeff Daniels on Earth) tries to reach him two years later.
On Mars, Damon’s astronaut is the MacGyver for a new generation, “a jack of all trades and a master of all,” Scott says, a man who uses his own ingenuity to make water and grow potatoes (a feat on a planet with no soil).
In real life? Damon’s gardening skills are “horrible,” he says with a laugh.
“My wife and I joke about the fact that I have a big brother and my big brother can fix anything,” he says. “He can build anything from scratch. I remember calling him when we were living in New York in this rental apartment, and I didn’t want to put a nail in the wall to hang like, a poster. I called my brother and he was like, ‘Do you have a stud sensor?’ I’m like, ‘What?’ I’m useless.”
Scott calls The Martian his Robinson Crusoe and, in a sense, it’s Damon’s Castaway.
Damon spends the majority of the shoot in solitary confinement, acting against himself. The challenge, the actor says, was “to try to make something that wouldn’t bore everybody to tears when it’s just you on screen.”
Enter a modern friend: Instead of Wilson the volleyball, Mark Watney has a Go Pro (several, in fact).
“A man on his own talking to himself, it could get boring,” says Scott, who rigged the tiny mobile cameras, popularized today by everyone from surfers to waterskiing squirrels, all over his set.
“The Go Pro has become his buddy,” the director says. “He would then start addressing it as though it was a friend.”
And cursing at it. “It’s not Castaway in the sense that it’s actually a guy who is behaving with the expectation that people are watching him,” Damon says. “He’s on video all the time on these Go Pros. Nobody’s seeing the video feed live, but he’s behaving as if someday someone might.”
Of course, Damon wasn’t really alone on the $100-million movie as he microwaved spuds, patched holes in his temporary home and literally made it rain. “Ridley’s like five feet away the whole time,” Damon says.
A solo performance is a notch on the belt for the star, who first wowed Scott with his sly, deft performance in 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Chastain calls Damon a character actor hidden in a movie star’s body. “He always plays these really interesting characters,” she says. “You look at his career and you look at The Informant and you look at Behind the Candelabra. ... He really is one of the best we have.”
Could The Martian earn him an Oscar nomination? The motion picture academy is into solitary sojourns into space: Gravity rocketed into the best-picture race just two years ago.
The Martian scored rave reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival. Variety called it “enthralling and rigorously realistic,” and Vanity Fair declared: “It’s time to start talking about Matt Damon’s next Oscar.” (Damon was last nominated for best supporting actor for 2009’s Invictus; he won a best-screenplay statue for 1997’s Good Will Hunting.)
Damon is within “striking distance” of the best-actor race, says GoldDerby.com founder and awards analyst Tom O’Neil. Right now, Johnny Depp (Black Mass) Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs), Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant) and Bryan Cranston (Trumbo) are bubbling to the top. “While he’s not yet in the top five, Damon could break in if The Martian is successful with critics and movie-goers,” O’Neil says.
The Martian marks Damon’s second big-budget space drama movie in two years. Last year, he was the surprise cameo as a menacing astronaut in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
OK, so what was more dense — the script for Interstellar or for The Martian?
Damon laughs.
“Interstellar was more dense,” he says. “Wormholes? I had to read that one a few times. I remember calling Chris and just going, ‘How are you going to shoot this? ”
But that job required only seven days of work. “When [Nolan] offered me the part, he called me up and he goes, ‘You know the saying there are no small parts, there are only small actors?’ And I said yeah. And he said, ‘Well, this is a small part. Sorry.’ ” Damon laughs. “But I really wanted to work with him, so ...”
Conversely, The Martian required slavish devotion and weeks in not-so-glamorous space suits.
“Matt said that when you wear those suits, you feel like a big baby because you can’t do anything. You need someone else if you want a drink of water or whatever to help you,” Chastain says. “There’s something about wearing those space suits and being hung up high above the ground and thinking, ‘OK, my life is in someone else’s hands.’ But then you hear Matt talking to you about movies and life or asking when’s the last vacation I went on. It was just fun.”
Here on Earth, Damon, his wife and four children are settled in to life in Los Angeles, having moved from New York two years ago.
A proud smile crosses his face when he talks about his kids. “My oldest daughter just got her licence yesterday,” he says. He taught her how to drive. “She would drive last year just to school every morning. We’d get in the car and drive.”
But we never see pictures of Damon’s brood — ever. Damon famously avoids A-list watering holes, and he manages to keep a low profile, even in paparazzi-laden Hollywood. “He’s very happy having a private life, which I really respect,” Chastain says.
The actor practically knocks on wood when you bring his family’s privacy up. “I attribute a lot of it to luck,” he says. “They [paparazzi] shoot me every day coming out of the gym. [But] married guy with kids, it’s not that exciting.”
