Ask him anything! From his bromance with Ben Affleck to his favorite type of taco, no topic was off limits during Matt Damon’s Tuesday, July 19, Reddit AMA.
The 45-year-old actor, who participated in his first Ask Me Anything session back in February 2014, decided to field fans’ questions again for a candid — and funny! — second round ahead of the July 29 release of the new Jason Bourne movie. Us Weekly rounded up the blockbuster star’s eight best answers.
1. Good Will Hunting — for which he and Ben Affleck won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1998 — is his favorite film of his career.
“Good Will Hunting obviously is the most influential movie in my life, and in Ben’s life, and bringing it to the screen kind of dominated our 20s. It took five years to get it from the time we started to the time it came out, it took five years. So I would love to write another script with Ben; I love Ben, I love his work, he’s been my buddy for 35 years. The big issue is time for us. We have a company together so we work on a lot of projects together, but to try to carve out the time is really tough. I mean we both have a whole mess of kids now, and these other days jobs. He’s directing all the time and I’m off working with these other directors. The thing about Good Will Hunting is that we were unemployed and we weren’t writing the script on a deadline either. Nobody was expecting it, so we were just these two idiots in our basement writing this thing, and now we have all of these pressures of the lives grown-ups have.”
2. Could Damon’s Jason Bourne beat Affleck’s Batman in a fight?
“I think the answer to that is clear. I’ll let you fill in the blanks.”
3. And because we were all curious, this is what goes into Damon’s ideal taco.
“The ingredients of my ideal taco, oh my god. Fantastic question. My ideal taco is actually the taco I’m not supposed to have, which is the taco we have on taco night at my house. It’s the crunchy corn shell with the good meat, just ground beef in there. It’s all about the layering. The meats gotta be hot, and the cheese goes on first so that it melts. And then you’re gonna get in there with a little bit of tomato and lettuce but not too much cause it’s not a salad, it’s a taco, and then you’re gonna throw some avocado on top and some sour cream and then a bunch of Cholula. I don’t know if you know what Cholula hot sauce is but it’s the best. Throw a bunch of Cholula on there, maybe squeeze some lime on top, and go to town.”
4. On the topic of food, the dad of four attempted to settle the debate on whether hot dogs are a sandwich.
“I’ve never considered a hot dog a sandwich because a hot dog is a hot dog. I mean technically it comes between two pieces of bread or one fold it into two, so I guess you can classify it as a sandwich. Then what would you call it, a hot dog sandwich? That’s like a hat on a hat so let’s just keep it as a hot dog.”
5. His all-time favorite show growing up was CHiPs.
“I loved Erik Estrada, Ponch and John, you know. I used to get on my bike, and my mother actually sewed blue lines down a pair of chinos that I had so that I could have the tan pants with the blue lines that the California Highway Patrol [had], and get on my Huffy and ride around the neighborhood.”
6. Asked what his Jason Bourne costar Julia Stiles smells like, Damon offered a simple and sweet summary.
“Happiness.”
7. He never understood his “cameo” in 2004’s satirical film Team America: World Police, in which he was parodied as a puppet and made fun of for his stance on President George W. Bush’s war against Iraq.
“I was always kind of bewildered by Team America, I think because it’s hard for us to understand what our images are in public, I think we’re not good judges of that, and when I saw myself on screen just only able to say my own name and not really that well, I kind of wondered ‘Wow, is that how people perceive me?’ At that point I just kind of was like, I’m a screenwriter and an actor, and like, really? I can barely say my own name? So I was always bewildered by that, and I never talked to [Team America creators] Trey [Parker] and Matt [Stone] about that. And incidentally, I believe those two are geniuses, and I don’t use that word lightly. I think they are absolute geniuses, and what they’ve done is awesome and I’m a big fan of theirs, but I never quite understood that one. But I will say this. Those of us who were parodied in that video were parodied because we were against the Iraq war, and we went on the record against that car, and so history is on my side, not theirs.”
8. This is the first thing he thinks of when he hears “Jason Bourne.”
“Definitely pimp slapping a knife wielding assassin. That’s kind of the first thing, you know — it has absolutely no relation to my actual life, but I get to do it when I play Jason Bourne. So you know I think the people who make these movies with me, and there’s you know, a couple hundred of us and we’ve worked on these movies for years. We love this franchise as much as you guys do, so I think your question was funny but those moments of originality in those fight scenes, I mean that’s kind of what we geek out on and we try to think of ways to incorporate that fun fighting style where Bourne is finding found objects and defending himself with them, and in many ways he’s the opposite of James Bond. Where James Bond always has the right gadget, Jason Bourne never does, so he’s got to just improvise.
Read Damon’s entire Reddit AMA here.
