Matt Damon has a genius secret deal that he makes with stuntmen in case he accidentally punches them in the face during filming.
The 52-year-old has starred in a bunch of action movies including - of course - the Bourne franchise, in which he plays the titular CIA assassin Jason Bourne; a man who doesn’t shy away from a scrap when the situation calls for it.
So naturally, a lot of his roles have involved close-contact with various stuntmen, and while filming action-packed fight scenes, it turns out that on occasion Damon actually ends up walloping one of the poor blokes while the cameras are rolling.
Ouch.
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But as he’s a decent sort of fella, Damon has revealed that he has a plan in place to make amends just in case he does ever end up accidentally smacking one of them during filming.
Appearing on an episode of The Late Late Show with James Corden in 2016, he was asked about his ‘deal’ with the stuntmen, to which he quickly explained: “Yeah, so we do fights for all these movies and they’re really good fighters and me not so much - I like to box for fun and I’ve been doing it for a few decades - but I usually end up accidentally punching them.”
Not ideal. But this is where his plan comes in.
“And so my deal with them is - it started on the first movie,” he went on.
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“I told the first guy that I fought with in The Bourne Identity, ‘for every time I accidentally punch you in the face, I’ll buy you a bottle of champagne’.
“And the guy was a professional kickboxer - and from France - and he was, like, ‘this is a very good deal for me’.
“So in the end, I owed him a case of champagne - and so twelve bottles of champagne. So that’s basically my average on the four movies.”
He then went on to explain that in the fifth movie in the franchise he fought French star Vincent Cassel who was altogether less keen on the idea of being hit repeatedly in the face - albeit by accident - during filming.
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According to Damon, Cassel told him simply: “Matt, just do not hit me in the face.” Fair enough.
Personally, I reckon I’d take a smack in the face of Matt Damon for a bottle of champers, but each to their own.
And it looks like Damon is not the only actor who is generous with their fighting partners.
John Wick himself, Keanu Reeves, gave his stuntmen on John Wick: Chapter 4 a rare engraved Rolex watch as a thank for bringing the fight scenes to life.
Topics: TV and Film, Matt Damon, Celebrity
Claire Reid