'I think my taxes need to go up': Matt Damon on wealth, being a father and his friend George Clooney

 

How do you get one of the biggest beasts of the Hollywood jungle inside a bear suit? Make sure he’s doing a film about a widowed British zookeeper first...

'(Warren) Buffett has said it's crazy that he's taxed at 17 per cent overall, versus his secretary who's taxed at twice that - it's just not fair. I think my taxes need to go up,' said Matt Damon

'George Clooney is a terrific host,’ reveals Matt Damon as we look out over Central Park from a sprawling 45th-floor suite in New York’s Mandarin Oriental hotel.
‘He’ll take everybody on a tour of Lake Como on his boat. He’ll open up the finest wine. We eat right by the lake, and at a certain point when the kids are asleep he’ll jump in the lake. He takes the napkin off his lap and just goes flying over the edge.
'It happens literally every time you have dinner with the guy. If you serve enough wine at dinner, everybody goes in. Fully clothed. It’s cold, but it’s part of the fun.’
This is exactly the kind of story I’d expect from a chap like Damon.
At 41, he earns over £10 million a year, and along with Clooney and Brad Pitt he’s part of acting’s gilded inner circle. He enjoys, one imagines, the kind of playboy lifestyle they portrayed in the Ocean’s trilogy.
His recent Bourne films grossed a billion dollars worldwide. During filming of the 2009 movie Invictus in South Africa, he had his stepdaughter’s entire primary-school class flown out there for ten days. Chatting about Clooney and Lake Como sounds like his style.

'I could really identify with the guy - the thought of what would it be like without my wife, the desperation you'd feel trying to get through every day,' said Matt of his role in We Bought A Zoo

And yet it turns out he’s nothing like that whatsoever. His portrait of life chez Clooney is the first and last celebrity-type anecdote to pass his lips today.
With three young daughters and a 13-year-old stepdaughter, the actor has no interest in throwing money around; on the contrary, he’s highly critical of a group of people who did just that – the bankers who almost broke America.
‘They committed crimes,’ says Damon, who in 2010 narrated Inside Job, a hard-hitting documentary exposing the culprits of the 2008 financial crisis.
‘They defrauded people and nothing has happened to them. Then they were bailed out. It’s just ridiculous. They cannot help themselves in terms of their own greed. If you remove the regulations they’re just going to go bananas, enrich themselves and screw everybody else.’
His views on the wealthy elite aren’t just talk; recently he backed billionaire philanthropist Warren Buffett’s call for increased taxes on the super-rich.
‘Buffett has said it’s crazy that he’s taxed at 17 per cent overall, versus his secretary who’s taxed at twice that – it’s just not fair. I think my taxes need to go up.’

Reluctant to appear in something called We Bought A Zoo, Matt capitulated after watching the classic British film Local Hero (1983)

How much more tax would he be prepared to pay?
‘Whatever was asked of me.’
Really?
‘I’d mind,’ he says, wincing at the thought, ‘but I think it’s the right thing.’

He looks out of the window again – not at Central Park, but at the steaming streets 45 floors below, which he pounded as a teenager with his equally ambitious childhood friend Ben Affleck. Growing up, they shared a dream of Hollywood stardom.
‘It was weird,’ says Damon. ‘We were doing auditions aged 13, just kids walking the streets of New York, not getting any roles – thank God! It probably would have messed me up. But we were both intense and really focused, I think because we pushed each other.’

Damon’s focus led to a place at Harvard, where he studied English – though he never graduated.
‘I started the Good Will Hunting screenplay in a class at Harvard. I went for over four years; I just didn’t get the credit for it. Technically I’m still on an extended leave of absence.’

Good Will Hunting (1997) propelled Damon and Affleck into the spotlight, earning the duo, neither yet 28, a joint screenwriting Oscar. This year they’ll be back on home turf, collaborating for the first time in 15 years on a film about notorious Boston mobster Whitey Bulger. Damon stars as Bulger, with Affleck directing.

'He'll take everybody on a tour of Lake Como on his boat. He'll open up the finest wine. We eat right by the lake, and at a certain point when the kids are asleep he'll jump in the lake,' said Matt of George Clooney

But his next film to hit cinemas is a less grandiose affair, and involves a surprising number of snakes.
Two years ago, Oscar-winning director Cameron Crowe met Damon to try to persuade him to take the lead role in an unusual family drama based on the memoirs of British journalist Benjamin Mee.
Reluctant to appear in something called We Bought A Zoo, Damon capitulated after watching the classic British film Local Hero (1983), which Crowe had recommended as an example of the kind of inspiring but gritty human story he wanted to make.
Mee’s memoirs relate his experience of quitting journalism in 2006 and risking everything to buy a run-down zoo in Dartmoor, in the process saving 200 animals that were due to be put down.
At the time, his wife Katherine was battling cancer. She died a few months later, leaving Mee to look after their two small children while simultaneously facing financial ruin.
Crowe added glamour, casting Scarlett Johansson as a zookeeper and transferring the action to California, while also changing the timeline. The fictional Mee is a widower when the film begins.

Good Will Hunting (1997) propelled Matt and Ben Affleck into the spotlight, earning the duo, neither yet 28, a joint screenwriting Oscar

‘I could really identify with the guy – the thought of what would it be like without my wife, the desperation you’d feel trying to get through every day,’ says Damon, who met the saviour of Dartmoor Zoo when Mee flew out to the LA set last spring.
In the film, Damon as Mee has to battle a fastidious zoo inspector and deal with his rebellious teenage son, an ailing tiger, an escaped bear and a shipment of snakes.
‘Scarlett loved the snakes,’ he laughs. ‘I was totally freaked out by them to start, as I’d never picked up a snake before. I had some childish fear of being bitten, but I was assured they weren’t poisonous. They were really quite friendly. You just drape them all over you.’
The bear presented a greater challenge, however.
‘He was over 12ft tall, just massive, and he got very close when I was in the car in one scene, closer than we are right now,’ he explains, moving to within inches.
‘He could have put his face through the window. There’s something strange that happens when you get that close to these animals, realising at a very deep level that you’re somewhere in the middle of the food chain.’
The film’s central themes of loss and fatherhood were what resonated most with Damon.

When Matt was offered the chance to be directed by his hero Clint Eastwood in Invictus - he considered turning it down, as it meant moving to the country for two months

‘I couldn’t have done this part ten years ago,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t have understood how much Benjamin Mee loved his wife. It’s so much work to raise kids, it’s such a team effort, and to suddenly be without your partner? It just instantly choked me up.
'I was raised by divorced parents, and so the idea of doing that on your own, when you’ve been expecting to do it with a partner – on top of losing that partner – it’s a lot. It really got to me.’

Born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Damon and his older brother Kyle, now an artist, enjoyed an unusual upbringing.
His parents, Kent, a stockbroker, and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an education professor, divorced when he was very young. The boys lived with their mother, who believed that conventional toys hampered creativity.
‘Our play was very open-ended and imaginative, and she encouraged that. She would say she knew I was going to be an actor when I was two years old. And that she knew Kyle was going to be an artist. She could see from the way we played.’

Matt with the cast of School Ties in 1992, five years before Good Will Hunting

Damon’s own children are clearly hugely important to him. So much so that when offered the chance to be directed by his hero Clint Eastwood in Invictus – the true story of how Nelson Mandela spurred the South African rugby team to victory in the 1995 World Cup – he considered turning it down, as it meant moving to the country for two months.
Damon was adamant that he didn’t want to be separated from his family. But when you’re one of the world’s highest-paid actors, the normal restrictions of parenthood don’t apply, as Damon demonstrated when he flew Alexia’s entire class from New York to the South African film set for ten days – at his own expense.
‘It was the practical thing to do,’ he says, laughing at my incredulous expression.
‘It was either that or I wasn’t going to do the movie – and it had always been my dream to work with Clint Eastwood.’
It proved an astute career move; his performance in Invictus gained him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

‘At a certain point I was willing to work for Clint for free,’ says Damon. ‘So long as the ten-day school trip didn’t cost more than I was being paid for the movie, it was, for me, a good deal.
'I sorted it out with the school months beforehand. I said, “I’ll offer this trip to the students; can you do something on Mandela so they know who he is?”
'So the school did a Nelson Mandela mini-course. When they came over to South Africa they visited townships and went to Robben Island. It was really great for the kids and it meant that my family would only be apart for a short amount of time.’
Damon has been married for six years to Luciana Barroso (he calls her Lucy), with whom he lives in Manhattan.

Matt has been married for six years to Luciana Barroso, with whom he lives in Manhattan

As a young man, he dated actresses Minnie Driver and Winona Ryder.
Argentinian Barroso was working behind a bar when he met her while filming in Miami. Their first daughter, Isabella, was born six months after their wedding. Gia followed in 2008, Stella in 2010. I put it to Damon that he appears to be leading a charmed life.
Are there any regrets?
‘Well, I am the guy who passed on Avatar,’ he laughs. ‘I had to: I was working on The Bourne Ultimatum. And I was desperate to work with (James) Cameron. I think he’s a genius.’
He doesn’t rule out revisiting Jason Bourne, but will only do so if his friend, British director Paul Greengrass (who directed the last two instalments), is at the helm.
‘We’d both love to do one, but you’d be crazy to go into it again without a great script. It would be unforgivable to do a poor job and ruin Bourne.’ His face is inscrutable. (The Bourne Legacy, starring Jeremy Renner instead of Damon and directed by Tony Gilroy, is out in August.)
Never one to stand still, he’s also keen to direct in the near future, following in Eastwood’s footsteps.
‘Clint said, “I’m going to get tired of looking at myself on screen”, and started directing when he was my age,’ says the actor.
‘He jumps out of bed in the morning ready to go; he’s excited about the day. I want to feel that way when I’m his age. He just feels like a guy who’s got it all figured out.’
The same could be said for Matt Damon.