'The Odyssey' actor Matt Damon reveals Hollywood's biggest stars turned down the role before him: 'They all passed,' jokes Nolan; Watch

Matt Damon has a simple explanation for how he landed the lead role in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. According to him, just about every other major star in Hollywood said no first.

During a promotional interview with Fandango, Damon sat alongside Nolan, Anne Hathaway, and Tom Holland to discuss the upcoming film. When the interviewer asked him about the timing of the role and why it felt right at this stage of his career, Damon explained that the scale of Nolan's vision demanded a level of maturity he simply did not have earlier in his career.

Damon then began listing the kind of names Nolan usually works with, including Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Cillian Murphy and Hugh Jackman. He also threw in Robert Pattinson and John David Washington from Nolan’s regular orbit.


He said, "Chris, normally hires out of the pool of actors that he knows and works with and had he stayed inside his stable of actors. I mean, the people in my cohort, it's like Christian and Tom Hardy and Leo and Matthew and JD and Rob and Hugh Jackman and Killian. It's like a murderer's row of great actors and all of them would have been fantastic."

At that point, Nolan cut in with the punchline: “But they all passed.”

Clips of the exchange have since spread across social media.

Damon said that if Nolan had stayed inside his usual circle, the role would have gone to another familiar face. Instead, the director looked outside that group, and Damon was ready to jump on it.

Damon said, “What are the chances that every single one of them would pass? Right? So, I'm sitting here going, 'Well, he's about to look outside. I better take this because outside you've got—you've got Brolan and Benio and Sean Pan—I'm screwed. So I gotta—I'm just going to jump on this thing."


A demanding shoot by all accounts

Away from the jokes, Damon has been consistent in describing The Odyssey as the most demanding production of his career. In multiple interviews he has said Nolan warned him upfront that the project would be exceptionally difficult, with the cast working in real outdoor locations rather than studio sets and facing physically taxing conditions throughout.

He has also spoken about Nolan's insistence on practical filmmaking, saying the director pushed the entire crew toward authenticity rather than relying on digital shortcuts.

Damon plays Odysseus, the King of Ithaca whose ten-year journey home after the Trojan War is the foundation of Homer's ancient epic. The film reunites him with Nolan after their previous work together on Interstellar and Oppenheimer.

The rest of the cast includes Tom Holland as Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Robert Pattinson as Antinous, alongside Lupita Nyong'o, Jon Bernthal, Samantha Morton, Benny Safdie, Elliot Page, and Himesh Patel among others.

The Odyssey is scheduled to release on 17 July. Nolan and the cast have recommended watching it in IMAX.