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"  July 2011, Save Our Schools rally, Washington, DC. In the 100-degree heat, it&amp;#039;s almost like a fever dream: Matt Damon, the minimalist movie star, the most unplasticine of screen heros\u2014head shaved, tanned, arm muscles working under a slim black T-shirt\u2014stands in the shadow of the White House, railing about &amp;quot;corporate reformers&amp;quot; and high-stakes &amp;quot;drill-and-kill nonsense&amp;quot; testing. When he quotes his mother, an educator on stage beside him, refusing to submit her boy to standardized testing\u2014&amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s stupid, it won&amp;#039;t tell you anything, and it&amp;#039;ll just make him nervous&amp;quot;\u2014the usually mild-mannered attendees roar like the Red Sox nation. If this were a Matt Damon movie, we&amp;#039;d cut to a kinetic handheld-camera shot of our man hacking Arne Duncan&amp;#039;s computer, then catapulting off a Capitol Hill veranda into a waiting helicopter. It&amp;#039;s a preposterous thing to wish for, of course, but then there&amp;#039;s something about Damon&amp;#039;s real-life persona\u2014the physical adroitness, the brainy incorruptibility, the evident sense of duty\u2014that blurs the line between truth (actor) and fiction (hero). Like Roy Miller, Green Zone&amp;#039;s chief warrant officer, relentlessly hunting for truth about Iraqi WMDs; or David Norris, the idealistic yes-we-can Senate hopeful in The Adjustment Bureau; or even Jason Bourne, the conflicted killing machine fighting government conspiracy\u2014Damon has always had the courage of his convictions. When he&amp;#039;s right, he knows he&amp;#039;s right. This is the guy who, as a 25-year-old nobody, stood up to heavyweight Harvey Weinstein to demand his contractual right to director approval for the first movie he&amp;#039;d ever written. It was Good Will Hunting; he and cowriter Ben Affleck wanted Gus Van Sant. (They got him and, eventually, a matching set of Best Original Screenplay Oscars, to boot.) Damon is also the guy who, when The Bourne Supremacy was shot, finished, in the can, was still tossing and turning over the film&amp;#039;s unsatisfying ending. &amp;quot;When you get to the end of a long process and everyone&amp;#039;s suffering from sleep deprivation, it&amp;#039;s very easy to say, `Oh, it&amp;#039;ll be fine,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; says Paul Greengrass, who directed that film as well as The Bourne Ultimatum and Green Zone. &amp;quot;He couldn&amp;#039;t rest with anything other than it being right.&amp;quot; Damon and a screenwriter cowrote a new ending; Damon called the studio chief himself to get the budget to reshoot; Greengrass flew to L.A. to direct it the next day. The result is one of the trilogy&amp;#039;s most taut scenes: Bourne, on the phone with his pursuer, Joan Allen&amp;#039;s CIA agent, Pamela Landy, tells her, &amp;quot;You look tired.&amp;quot; Suddenly she knows she&amp;#039;s being watched. When Damon arrives at a Vancouver restaurant on a crystalline October morning, he seems to take up more space than his technical 5&amp;#039;10&amp;quot; allotment. The preppy School Ties prettiness of his youth is tempered now by a few well-placed creases around the eyes and a certain comfortable-in-his-skin masculinity. If Damon weren&amp;#039;t Hollywood&amp;#039;s most all-American male\u2014those teeth! that patriotism!\u2014or the Cambridge-raised, Harvard-schooled poster boy of East Coast liberalism, he would have made a model Canadian: educated, funny, laid-back, allergic to pretense, fond of fleece. Today he radiates a particularly Pacific-Northwestern vigor, having spent the summer getting fit Mountie-style, racing up a vertiginous local hike known as the Grouse Grind with his wife of six years, Luciana. Damon is known for his work ethic; when he says he treated getting in shape &amp;quot;like a job,&amp;quot; it means something. But today, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve shot the scene where I don&amp;#039;t have my shirt on,&amp;quot; he says, hoisting his latte. &amp;quot;I can have milk in my coffee again.&amp;quot; The spartan lifestyle and still-shiny pate\u2014incognito today beneath a knit cap\u2014were necessitated by Elysium, South African\u2013born director Neill Blomkamp&amp;#039;s 2013 follow-up to the gory political sci-fi thriller District 9. A dystopian immigration allegory, the film stars Damon as we&amp;#039;ve never seen him, roughened up and dressed up\u2014in cyborg regalia, heavily tattooed, with a screen (the result of his character&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Tijuana-grade, back-alley brain surgery&amp;quot;) affixed to his scalp. Even off-duty, his nails are coal-miner black, his forearms burred with remnants of tattoo adhesive. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sticky and filthy,&amp;quot; he says, immune to how such a remark might sound to his fan base. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re getting me at my best.&amp;quot; As Damon sees it, his is not the type of stardom enjoyed by, say, a young Tom Cruise, who could make the middling Cocktail work just by being in it. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not Brad Pitt or George Clooney,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Those guys walk into a room and the room changes. I think there&amp;#039;s something more...not average, but everyman about me.&amp;quot; People constantly tell him, &amp;quot;My brother looks just like you.&amp;quot; His best roles\u2014the slippery, double-dealing faux Princetonite in The Talented Mr. Ripley; the corporate-stooge compulsive liar of The Informant!\u2014have played off that Boy Scout exterior: when a guy who looks that upstanding and trustworthy turns bad, it&amp;#039;s a double whammy. &amp;quot;The minute people started saying, `He&amp;#039;s the all-American guy,&amp;#039; my career got interesting,&amp;quot; Damon says. &amp;quot;It liberated me. Instantly it was an image directors could fuck with.&amp;quot; If he lacks Pitt&amp;#039;s raw sex appeal or Clooney&amp;#039;s debonair charm\u2014and some would argue he surpasses them both\u2014Damon does have a niche. Nice. The word clings to him with the persistence of cigarette smoke. Scarlett Johansson, his costar in this month&amp;#039;s We Bought a Zoo, calls him &amp;quot;a sweetheart, loved by everybody.&amp;quot; Joan Allen says he&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;above and beyond.&amp;quot; Greengrass echoes, &amp;quot;The truth is, all those stories about him being the nicest guy? That&amp;#039;s all true.&amp;quot; And his friend (and potential rival for the niche in question) John Krasinski: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d nominate him as one of the people who makes his parents the most proud.&amp;quot; These are hardly indictments, of course. They&amp;#039;re exactly what you want in your kid&amp;#039;s soccer coach, your gay best friend. But a leading man? We admire the moral compass, but do we want to take it to bed? Damn right we do. Damon, more than any of his contemporaries, projects strength\u2014not just the kind that could decimate your foes, but the kind that enables him to stand by you after the fact. And the long-haul man is sexy indeed. &amp;quot;For big stars, sometimes you might not necessarily always believe that they&amp;#039;re really, really in love with somebody, or they really love that child,&amp;quot; says Allen. As Hereafter&amp;#039;s reluctant telepath, able to contact the recent dead by holding the hands of their loved ones, or the bereaved husband in Contagion, unable to process the news that his wife (a supervirus-spreading Gwyneth Paltrow) has died, &amp;quot;Matt can project caring,&amp;quot; Allen says. It&amp;#039;s what renders Jason Bourne so compelling\u2014a humanity that Greengrass says gets &amp;quot;squeezed out&amp;quot; of most big franchise movies but that Damon &amp;quot;insists on.&amp;quot; Damon is fiercely loyal to his wife\u2014a &amp;quot;real,&amp;quot; non-Hollywood, Argentina-born former bartender from Miami\u2014and their adamantly off-the-radar domesticity. At home in New York, he is happily outnumbered in a household of women: Alexia, his wife&amp;#039;s daughter from a previous relationship, 13; Isabella, 5; Gia, 3; and Stella, 1. &amp;quot;Lucy,&amp;quot; he laughs, &amp;quot;has pretty much been pregnant for five years. We thought we were done, but Stella had other ideas.&amp;quot; When the baby cries at night, he goes into his middle daughters&amp;#039; bedroom. &amp;quot;They wake up, and they&amp;#039;re confused,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;So I say, `Daddy&amp;#039;s right here,&amp;#039; and they go back to sleep. And then that way we can let Stella cry for two minutes, and she&amp;#039;s out.&amp;quot; Sensing, perhaps, that Mr. Nice Guy can get to be a very dull boy, Damon has tossed the dice. In 2010, he skewered himself with a stint as Tina Fey&amp;#039;s neurotic pilot boyfriend on 30 Rock. And then there was the video with Sarah Silverman for Jimmy Kimmel Live. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m F---ing Matt Damon!&amp;quot; Silverman crows to her then boyfriend Kimmel, confessing the supposed affair, while Damon, grinning deliriously, taunts: &amp;quot;On the bed, on the floor, on the towel by the door, in the tub, in the car, up against the minibar.&amp;quot; According to Kimmel, Damon didn&amp;#039;t flinch when he read the material. &amp;quot;I think he operates pretty simply,&amp;quot; Kimmel says. &amp;quot;If it&amp;#039;s really funny, he&amp;#039;ll do it and doesn&amp;#039;t worry too much about it.&amp;quot; The same principle seems to apply to on-set practical jokes. An Elysium costar decided to get the jump on Damon&amp;#039;s renowned scheming by taking pictures of himself in costume wrecking Damon&amp;#039;s trailer. But Damon took too much pleasure in the poor man&amp;#039;s mounting paranoia to retaliate\u2014yet. &amp;quot;Every day after work, he kind of sneaks into his trailer like Inspector Clouseau, thinking something is going to happen,&amp;quot; Damon says, a maniacal edge to his voice. &amp;quot;As time goes on, it&amp;#039;s literally eating him alive.&amp;quot; In Cameron Crowe&amp;#039;s We Bought a Zoo, Damon has the look of his 41 years\u2014the brushy, gray-peppered hair and desk-job contours of a father of two, struggling after the death of his wife. With a fridge full of sympathy lasagna and the neighborhood single moms in hot pursuit, he packs his family off to a country house, which, yes, happens to be equipped with its own zoo (run by Johansson&amp;#039;s hardy zookeeper, so devoted to her charges she has no time to date). It&amp;#039;s a pleasure to watch Damon do something as human and fallible as parenting; the truth he brings to this father\u2014his desperation to please, his resentment of the adolescent son who rejects this radical new plan\u2014reads as experi\u00ADence. Johansson praises Damon&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;rough-around-the-edges, no-bullshit&amp;quot; onscreen fathering. &amp;quot;He knows when it hurts and when it&amp;#039;s full of joy and when it&amp;#039;s hard.&amp;quot; Damon was wary of the film&amp;#039;s Disney-fied elements\u2014precocious children, unruly animals\u2014but he saw something in the script that spoke to him: a love story, minus the love interest. &amp;quot;What do you do if your partner is gone?&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;There was something that really struck me about that, about life just not working out in the way that you thought it would.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a role he&amp;#039;d never have taken before becoming a parent, &amp;quot;or before having a marriage like the one that I have,&amp;quot; he says, shaking his head. &amp;quot;I wouldn&amp;#039;t have been able to relate at all.&amp;quot; And it was a chance to work with Cameron Crowe. &amp;quot;I thought, Well, this is the guy who did `You complete me,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; says Damon. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a high-wire act. It could easily devolve into cheese, and it&amp;#039;s not\u2014it&amp;#039;s epic.&amp;quot; If Damon has a credo, it&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Follow the director.&amp;quot; He professes that all praise for his movies&amp;#039; successes\u2014and his own distinct shortage of professional failures\u2014is due to their directors. And his r\u00E9sum\u00E9 reads like a laundry list of Hollywood greats: Van Sant, Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley), Martin Scorsese (The Departed), Robert De Niro (The Good Shepherd), Joel and Ethan Coen (True Grit), Clint Eastwood (Hereafter, Invictus). Next year, he&amp;#039;ll top off his five-film streak with Steven Soderbergh\u2014The Informant!, Contagion, and the Oceans franchise\u2014by playing the audacious, 40-years-younger lover to Michael Douglas&amp;#039; Liberace in HBO&amp;#039;s Behind the Candelabra. (For now, he&amp;#039;s hazy on the details, &amp;quot;except for making out with Michael.&amp;quot;) There&amp;#039;s no telling whether Damon will start taking credit for his work once he joins the directorial ranks himself this spring. His behind-the-camera debut, which he and Krasinski are co\u00ADwriting, is about an upstate New York town torn over whether to drill for natural gas. &amp;quot;It raises interesting issues about the identity of the country,&amp;quot; Damon says. Still, both writers insist the film is about relationships\u2014not an &amp;quot;issue movie.&amp;quot; But would Matt Damon bother to direct a movie that didn&amp;#039;t at least touch on an issue? Damon grew up steeped in social consciousness. After his parents divorced when he was two, he and his brother lived with their mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an early-childhood-education professor of some renown, in a Cambridge triple-decker where household responsibilities were shared by six families. There were vacations on his mother&amp;#039;s research trips, living with local families in Guatemala and Mexico. In Cambridge, the next-door neighbor happened to be radical historian Howard Zinn, who retold America&amp;#039;s past from the perspective of the working poor in the seminal A People&amp;#039;s History of the United States. (Later, Damon narrated an audio version of the book.) This fostered &amp;quot;an overall way of thinking, an understanding of personal responsibility,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;A desire to make life better for everybody.&amp;quot; For the past few years, Damon seems to have found some measure of comfort with the scratchy mantle of fame by doing what most of us like to believe we&amp;#039;d do, given the platform and the funding afforded by celebrity: doing good. Using the same righteous-yet-reasonable tones he employs as the go-to narrator for current-events documentaries (Inside Job; American Teacher; PBS&amp;#039;s Women, War, and Peace), Damon has also pushed his agenda as the cofounder of Water.org, which offers microfinance loans to help families in Africa and India either drill wells or tap into existing water lines. We hear so much about celebrity causes these days that the immensity of this one takes a second to sink in\u2014he&amp;#039;s attempting to get a handle on a crisis that touches a billion people. As Ben Stiller put it at an American Cinematheque dinner honoring Damon last year: &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t screw around. You went out and claimed water. I mean, that&amp;#039;s, like, an element!&amp;quot; Damon&amp;#039;s unscripted moments have proven even more interesting: calling out Sarah Palin&amp;#039;s folksy inexperience and specious grasp of historical facts\u2014like, say, the existence of dinosaurs\u2014in 2008; suggesting the Bush twins should be shipped off to war; tarring conservative then New York Times columnist William Kristol as an &amp;quot;idiot.&amp;quot; While most Hollywood power-Dems continue to back their com\u00ADmander in chief\u2014albeit with somewhat subdued ardor\u2014Damon, one of Obama&amp;#039;s earliest and loudest public supporters, told Piers Morgan last year that the president &amp;quot;misinterpreted his mandate&amp;quot; by rolling over to banks and extending Bush-era tax cuts. Is it mere coincidence that today, just down the Vancouver street from where Damon sits, the first day of Occupy Wall Street\u2013offshoot wildfire has flared up over the border? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grassroots level. One of them said to me, `Never again. I will never be fooled again by a politician,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Damon says, his disappointment ringing with a now-familiar tone of wounded idealism. &amp;quot;You know, a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, much better.&amp;quot; Damon gestures in the direction, just out of sight over the tree line, of the sign-wielding picketers who are beginning to gather steam. &amp;quot;If the Democrats think that they didn&amp;#039;t have a mandate\u2014people are literally without any focus or leadership, just wandering out into the streets to yell right now because they are so pissed off,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Imagine if they had a leader.&amp;quot; And, as on the day of that DC rally, it is momentarily possible to get swept up in the moment, to imagine\u2014however ridiculously, whether in reality or coming soon to a multiplex near you\u2014exactly that. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a11839/matt-damon-hollywoods-sexiest-mr-nice-guy-611913/>