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  Now, George Clooney is right—People has named Matt Damon Sexiest Man Alive only once. He is not the biggest global celebrity. He’s not the biggest movie star, and it’s a matter of debate whether he’s the most handsome in Jimmy Kimmel’s “Handsome Men’s Club.” But he’s pretty damned close—close enough to be on the inside, close enough to hear the stories, close enough to tell the stories, close enough to tell stories about those who tell the stories. And the stories—well, they’re delicious, sweetened by their exclusivity and by the fact that they’re strictly rationed. They’re in none of the books, and for good reason: They’re occasionally too good to be true.

  • • •

  You want to know what famous people talk about? They talk about you and me, first of all—the people on the other side of the lake, the people peering inside the window, the extent to which they’ll go to get a look or a photograph. Then they talk about one another. Those are the best stories because they’re also performances. Damon is famous for his Matthew McConaughey imitation, but three or four or five or six big beers into the night, he did quick imitations of nearly everyone he talked about. He did Scorsese and Spielberg and Clint Eastwood. He did Russell Crowe and he did Tom Cruise. He did Russell Crowe talking about his relationship with director Ridley Scott—“Rid’s the general, I’m the soldier, and when we make a movie, we go to warl”—and he did Tom Cruise talking about the stunt director for one of the Mission: Impossible movies who refused to let him climb the side of a building without a stunt double. “I asked Tom, ‘Well, what did you do?’ And he looked at me”—and here Damon reproduced the Thetanic fixity of Cruise’s stare and the martinet hysteria of his voice—“and said, ‘I fired him, Matt.’”

  He told the Tom Cruise story for two reasons. Number one, it is a Tom Cruise story. Number two, Damon doesn’t climb buildings. He’s afraid of heights, and, he says, “That’s what Stuntmen are for. That’s what green screens are for. But Tom’s incredible. I said, ‘You have the title. Nobody’s ever going to take the title from you. You win.’ He laughed. But he also goes, ‘It was worth it’ And it was—for him. It’s not for me. I’m way too old to do all my own stunts.”

  And that’s the other thing about the stories famous people tell. They tend to tell stories about people more famous than they are. Matt Damon tells stories about Tom Cruise and George Clooney He tells a story about Bono telling a story about Paul McCartney. There are rings of fame, like some kind of obverse Inferno, and the people inside one ring tell stories about people in another—the ones who are farther inside, closer to some kind of impossible absolute. It’s a form of gossip, sure, and also of adulation, but it’s also an education, often the best education they’ve received. Damon left Harvard without graduating, but he’s something of a polymath who, no matter the subject, can tell you what he’s learned about it not just from the book he’s read but also from the person who wrote the book he’s read. He drops names like crazy, but he’s not so much a name-dropper as he is a student citing his sources. He talks about talking to Tom Cruise, Jodie Foster, Michael Strahan, Tom Brady, Martin Scorsese, Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Emily Blunt, and his friends Ben and Casey Affleck, but he also talks about talking to Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Farmer, Ray Kurzweil, Dave Eggers, and other assorted writers, economists, scientists, and advocates. He has access to them all in the same way that he has access to tables at the most exclusive restaurants, and it no longer matters that he dropped out of Harvard—fame has become his Harvard. In the globalized world, the false currency of celebrity has turned out to be the only one that resists devaluation because it has become the price of access and access has become the price of knowledge. We like to think that fame insulates its denizens from the real world. It is painful to contemplate what everyone drinking beer in that hotel lobby seemed to know—that fame brings the famous closer to the heart of things, or at least closer than the people clustered outside the gate can ever get.

  • • •

  My mother thought it was child abuse,” he says. “She literally did. She was a professor who specialized in early childhood development, and she thought putting a child onstage or in a commercial or in a movie was child abuse. So when I did Elysium with Jodie Foster, I asked her. I mean, she’s basically been acting since she was born. I figured if anyone’s going to know, it should be her, right? So I asked her. And she sort of smiled and said, ‘It depends on the child.’”

  Matt Damon was not a child actor. He was a child and then an adolescent enriched by progressive education in Cambridge, Massachusetts—by Howard Zinn as his neighbor, by Cambridge Rindge and Latin as his high school, by immersive-language study with Mom in Mexico and Guatemala as his summer vacation. But his friend Ben Affleck was a child actor, and acting became the ambitious way Matt separated himself from his mother’s ambitions. He not only acted in school plays; he also worked as an extra in Boston and can do an imitation of the guy who was, like, “the king of the extras, because he’d worked on Scorsese movies. And he was like, ‘Me and Marty, we’re like this. I give Marty exactly what he wants.’ And I’m sitting at this guy’s feet, thinking, Hey, one day, maybe that could be me.”

  At the time, Affleck was the star, both in school plays and at auditions. But Damon permitted himself to learn from him, and they became not just friends but also a team. “The summer after freshman year in college, we got a job together. I was eighteen. There was a theater in Harvard Square called the Janus. They had only one screen, and Ben and I got a job there. We were ticket takers and served popcorn—we basically did everything. But the kicker was that the movie we showed that summer was a movie Ben and I got relatively close on—Dead Poets Society. We got down the line; we got called back. Ben got even closer than I did. And that was the one movie they showed that summer. It was a constant reminder. We’d sit there, these young ambitious guys in our maroon vests, our black pants, our white shirts, and our fucking name tags, watching people coming out of the theater bawling their fucking eyes out.

  “It was like, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ But it underscored the difficulty of breaking in, enough that we were convinced we had to start writing.”

  Good Will Hunting began as a lark, the fanciful idea of two kids who loved to learn but didn’t want to go to school. “We were like, ‘Wouldn’t that be cool if you could read every book in the world and remember everything you read?’” But it became, Damon says, “an act of desperation.” Multiple drafts, written in multiple rented apartments over multiple years, developed by multiple studios: “We had an unlimited amount of time. It wasn’t like anybody cared. It wasn’t like anybody was waiting to see what we were doing…”

  But then, of course, it changed everything. The Best Screenplay Oscar changed everything. “Being known as a writer did change the relationships I had with directors. The rap on actors is that they always want to inflate their parts. But when directors know you write screenplays and have a different view of things, you really get invited into the huddle in a much fuller way. And those collaborations end in friendships. That’s how it works. It really is all about relationships. If you enjoy working with someone, you’ll find a way to work with him or her again. It’s human nature.”

  When Damon was in high school and in college, he had a Mickey Rourke poster on the wall of his bedroom. (Affleck: “I don’t remember that. I remember the Michael Jackson.”) Mickey Rourke was his favorite actor; he wanted to be Mickey Rourke. And so when he was still very young—before Good Will Hunting made him a star—and he got the lead role in The Rainmaker alongside Mickey Rourke, “I was really excited just to meet him. And then the first day of filming, he pulls me aside and just reads me the riot act. We were shooting in a really bad neighborhood in Memphis—we had security and everything—and I’m standing on a street corner and my boyhood idol is yelling at me. He’s saying, ‘Francis Ford Coppola wanted you for this movie—that’s a big deal. That sends a message to everyone in Hollywood that you have a future. S
o don’t do what I did. Don’t fuck it up!’”

  And Damon hasn’t. He might give the appearance of being a regular guy, but he hasn’t done what regular guys always do—he hasn’t fucked it up. He understands better than anyone else that celebrity is a social contract, and he has fulfilled it to the last jot and tittle. He’s passed every possible test of citizenship that fame could offer, and what you understand when you spend time with him is simply this:

  He’s a member of the club.

  • • •

  There’s a young actor with a big role in The Monuments Men. His name is Dimitri Leonidas, and he was, until Clooney cast him, a so-called unknown. He’s not one of the cast members who walk through the hotel lobby on either night that Damon is drinking beer. But Damon talks about him and says how bright his future is. He doesn’t say that his future is bright as an actor, though. He says, “He could be a movie star.”

  What does that mean, exactly? It’s uttered by a movie star, so it must mean something—it must mean that there are some qualifications for the job, and you don’t know what they are until you get it. It must mean that Matt Damon recognizes some kindred quality in Dimitri Leonidas, some degree of difference that only those with their own inexplicable difference can see. It also means that Damon thinks about these things a lot. He thinks about stardom and he thinks about fame, not to glory in them but to assess his own degree of difference and dislocation. He talks about what happened to him when he became a movie star as though it’s irrevocable:

  “When it happens to you, it’s not that you change. Everybody says you change, and you do eventually. But what happens, almost overnight, is that nothing and everything changes at the same time. You’re aware that everything that mattered yesterday still matters today. Everything is the same, and intellectually you understand that. But the world is completely different—for you. Everybody has changed their relationship to you, but you still live in the same world. So when people talk about the surreality of fame, that’s what they’re talking about. That’s what it was for me. It’s walking into a restaurant and everybody turns their head and starts whispering—and you’re like, ‘But I ate at this restaurant last week’ And so the world is still the same—it’s just never going to be the same for me. And that’s a real mind-fuck. The world is one degree stranger. It’s not like the houses have suddenly turned to gingerbread and you go, ‘Oh, it wasn’t like that before.’ You live in the same house, you go to the same market, you get coffee in the same place. It’s just that somebody has hired an unlimited amount of extras and given them very specific directions—for you. It’s as if a director has gotten there before you and grabbed a bullhorn and said, ‘Okay, when he comes in, if your name begins with A through M, count to ten and then notice him. N through Z, notice him right away’ It’s very strange.”

  • • •

  Here’s another story. Matt Damon tells it, but it’s not about Matt Damon. It’s about Brad Pitt. But it is also about Matt Damon because it’s about fame and Matt Damon is famous. But is he as famous as Brad Pitt? Is he as big a movie star? In some ways, he’s bigger—with the Bourne movies, he created the action franchise that Pitt hopes to create with World War Z. But there are measures of stardom other than weekend grosses, indices of which ring you occupy other than money. One is your degree of convergence with Bono. Another is pain.

  “If you can control the celebrity side of celebrity,” Damon says, “then it’s worth it. I look at Brad—and I have for years—and when I’m with him I see the intensity of that other side of it. And the paparazzi and the insane level of aggression they have and their willingness to break the law and invade his space—well, I wonder about that trade. I remember telling him that I walk my kids to school, and his face just fell. He was very kind, but he was like, ‘You bastard.’ Because he should be able to do that, too. And he can’t.”

  Damon can. He lives in New York, and he walks his kids to school. Photographers occasionally dog his steps, but generally from a distance, and if he asks them to back off, they will after they get their shots. He can do this because of what he didn’t do—or whom he didn’t marry. “I got lucky,” he says. “I fell in love with a civilian. Not an actress and not a famous actress at that. Because then the attention doesn’t double—it grows exponentially. Because then suddenly everybody wants to be in your bedroom. But I don’t really give them anything. If I’m not jumping up and down on a bar, or lighting something on fire, or cheating on my wife, there’s not really any story to tell. They can try to stake me out, but they’re always going to get the same story—middle-aged married guy with four kids. So as long as that narrative doesn’t change too much, there’s no appetite for it.”

  The narrative, however, is about to change. Damon and his wife, Lucy, and their four children are about to move to LA, despite knowing they will lose some of their privacy to an entrenched apparatus of snoops. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner live there, and even though “there are five or six photographers outside their house all the time,” Damon and his family have bought a house on the same street. Second, Damon and Affleck have started a production company, Pearl Street Films, “and we finally just rented offices and it’s like, Let’s get serious.” And third, “Most of our old friends with kids live in LA, and their kids don’t know me. I don’t like that.” (Affleck: “It’s like being in the neighborhood again.”)

  But the fourth and final reason is the most interesting. Damon is buying a house in Los Angeles because he couldn’t buy one in New York. “We tried to find a place for four years and couldn’t find one. We made five offers, and we had two places where we had a verbal agreement, the last of which I absolutely loved. And in both cases, they used my name to sell to someone else. In a lot of transactional situations, fame is a good thing—people are much nicer to you. But in this case, it worked against me. Or maybe people think I’m an actor, so I must be stupid.”

  • • •

  I drank beer for seven hours with Matt Damon on one night and four hours on another. I learned a lot of things. Because Damon knows the director Doug Liman, I learned that Tiger Woods kept missing the ball in that famous Nike commercial until the camera was turned on, whereupon he bounced it on the face of an iron and then whacked it two hundred yards. Because he knows Casey Affleck, I know that Joaquin Phoenix’s “break-down” really was a piece of performance art intended for the Affleck-directed documentary I’m Still Here, and that David Letterman really was pissed off when Affleck and Phoenix revealed the hoax to the New York Times instead of on his show. And because he knows Christopher Hitchens’s agent, I know the last thing Hitchens said before he died.

  I found out like this. Damon was talking about going to watch a TED Talk in the company of Paul Farmer, the great physician to the poor and one of Damon’s heroes. They went to see Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister and, as Farmer told Damon, one of the handful of people “who know how the world works.” Damon went and was amazed that every single one of Brown’s sentences was complete and every single one of his thoughts conformed to the shape of a paragraph—and that he didn’t use a teleprompter.

  “Christopher Hitchens was like that,” I said. “I saw him speak once, drunk, and if someone had written the whole thing down, he could have handed it in as an essay.”

  “I know his agent,” Damon said, for he is both possessor and habitual proprietor of upstream knowledge. “And he told me Hitchens’s last words.”

  We all waited. It was our chocolate bar.

  “They were capitalism fail.”

  When I came home, I discovered that Andrew Sullivan knows the same agent and wrote on the Daily Beast that Hitchens’s last words were “capitalism downfall.” I have no idea which version is correct. But that’s not the end of the story. The end of the story comes the next day, when Damon returns to his hotel room after a morning of filming and is inspired by the words “capitalism fail” to go online and watch a lecture by one
of his former professors at Harvard, Michael Sandel. “I took his class twenty-three years ago, and now I’m taking it again,” he says a few hours later on the patio. The same tiny waitress in the same traditional frock asks him if he’d like a beer, and this time he says, “Yes, a large beer” and begins speaking about what he learned from Sandel.

  “He was asking about the things that money can’t buy,” Damon said. “He was saying that we’ve gone from a market economy to a market society, where we’re essentially trying to monetize everything. He gave all these examples, like this jail in Santa Barbara where you can pay for a nicer cell and better treatment. The world changes in a fundamental way when you can buy your way out of any situation.”