Matt Damon

Matthew Paige Damon, born October 8, 1970, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and raised in Newton, Massachusetts, is one of the most durable and critically respected actors of his generation and, alongside his childhood friend Ben Affleck, one of the most celebrated screenwriting discoveries in Hollywood history — a performer and creative whose career embodies the ideal of the intelligent, principled, working actor who consistently chooses substance over spectacle. Growing up in a household shaped by his stockbroker father Kent and his education professor mother Nancy, who raised him and his brother Kyle after her divorce in an intellectually stimulating Cambridge environment — the family lived a few streets from Harvard University — Damon was steeped in academic culture and political engagement from childhood. He attended Harvard University himself, studying English literature, and spent so much time writing the script that would become Good Will Hunting that he ultimately left without completing his degree. Good Will Hunting (1997), co-written with Ben Affleck and directed by Gus Van Sant, not only won both men the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay — making them overnight cultural phenomena — but also featured Damon's central performance as the emotionally isolated, mathematically brilliant janitor Will Hunting in a performance that earned him a second simultaneous nomination for Best Actor, an extraordinary achievement for a debut feature. His subsequent career has been carefully managed and remarkably varied: Saving Private Ryan (1998), Rounders (1998), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), All the Pretty Horses (2000), Ocean's Eleven and its sequels (2001–2007), The Bourne Identity (2002) and its three sequels, which made him one of the defining action stars of the 2000s, Syriana (2005), The Departed (2006), The Good Shepherd (2006), Invictus (2009), True Grit (2010), Contagion (2011), Promised Land (2012), Elysium (2013), Interstellar (2014), The Martian (2015, for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor), Jason Bourne (2016), Downsizing (2017), Stillwater (2021), and Oppenheimer (2023). He is also the founder of the charity Water.org alongside Gary White, which has provided access to safe water and sanitation to tens of millions of people in the developing world.