best of matt damon 🫶🏼

Presenting GQ’s final cover star for the 2026 Men of the Year issue: Matt Damon gq.visitlink.me/8BErE8

Christopher Nolan’s #TheOdyssey demanded everything Matt Damon had to give—and he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. “If you’re not 100 percent in, it’s just not worth doing,” he tells @the_summerman. “You have to really let it take over your life.” gq.visitlink.me/sPV2Zn

Lightning struck once for Matt Damon, with Good Will Hunting in 1997, and he never thought he’d see that happen again, much less 29 years later. Still readjusting to life on dry land after The Odyssey, Damon sat down with GQ to unpack the most unlikely filmmaking experience of his career—and where he might want to go next gq.visitlink.me/arVJcI

Matt Damon on playing Odysseus: “To play a role that’s so physical and, at my age, to even have a role that’s available on a scale like this … I felt incredibly lucky, not only to be able to do it, but also to be able to contextualize it. I don’t think I would’ve appreciated it as much 20 years ago." gq.visitlink.me/fB7WSe

Matt Damon on “the list” in Hollywood that determines who can and can’t open a movie: “There’s very, very frank conversations between agents and studio people going like, 'I can’t greenlight the movie with X, but I can with Y.' And that list is always changing, and I know that sometimes I’m on it and sometimes I’m not. I just have to remember it’s not personal.” gq.visitlink.me/zMq3XS

Matt Damon on being a young actor gq.visitlink.me/LVW35S

Where does Matt Damon go after his epic leading man role in #TheOdyssey? “I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but I have such gratitude for the fact that this came along my path at this point,” he tells GQ. “I have no right to expect anything like that to happen again. But in the meantime, I just want to make good stuff and definitely keep work ing with Ben, because we’re at that point in our life where we’re like, ‘Fuck it, why not?’ This was our dream as kids, as boys. We got to honor those boys and keep working together if we can.” gq.visitlink.me/KFI8b4

Matt Damon tells GQ he’s “going to take a long time off” after his upcoming project with the Daniels: “They’re really good people, and this movie’s like a cosmic love bomb for the world.” gq.visitlink.me/Fp7ton

Matt Damon on #TheOdyssey: “The thing about a role like that is every single day I was paired with an unbelievable scene partner. One day I’d be working with Annie [Hathaway], and then the next day I’d be working with Himesh [Patel]. It’s following this character through all these different stages of his life and people who are close to him. So every day was a different, exciting little challenge, a little puzzle to figure out.” gq.visitlink.me/VcHp4B

Matt Damon on Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion in #TheOdyssey: “That’s the emotional spine of the movie. A lot of that monologue that I have at the end is in voiceover, but I wrote it all out and I had it on my phone and I would just carry it with me off set. I would just revisit it and run through it a few times, and I was doing that for months and months. Firstly, I thought it was just so beautifully written, but also because I knew that scene had to land. If that lands, then the movie works.” gq.visitlink.me/Sps0fN