  Matt Damon's character in Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd is the reserved and emotionally distant CIA agent Edward Wilson. |
NEW YORK -- Matt Damon is busy trying to charm a room full of flinty-hearted reporters by imitating the laugh of his infant daughter. It's working.
Damon, 36, is here to talk about being the ice-cold centre of The Good Shepherd, a film about the early years of the CIA. He stars as a master of counterintelligence, a man who puts his country before everything else, including family.
Hard to reconcile that guy with the man who says, beaming, that being a father is an amazing experience. Damon and his wife, Luciana Barroso, have a 6-month old daughter, Isabella.
"I don't really know how to talk about it. I feel like I got made a member of a club I didn't know existed," he says, of parenthood, "and it's really just wonderful. Other people's babies, you know -- they're always trying to show me pictures and trying to hand me their babies, and I'm like, 'Get that thing away from me! I don't want to touch your kid!' But I'm totally into it now." He laughs. "I was scared at first. I was excited for my daughter to be two, for her to be talking and walking and hanging out. But I didn't realize how much personality little people have, right off the bat, and it's been fun."
He describes her machine-gun laugh when he plays with her, and then he imitates the way her arms jerk in excitement when she's happy to see him.
It's a delightful performance. And a good one.
Damon played cloak-and-dagger characters before taking a role in The Good Shepherd -- Jason Bourne springs to mind -- but never with such restraint. His character shows almost no emotion. Robert De Niro's direction on the film, he explains, was quite specific on that front.
"Bob is just insistent on absolute naturalism and realism and he's a student of human behaviour ... And of course the guy should be subtle. He's the head of counterintelligence. I mean, what's he going to do, tell you how he's feeling?" Laughing, he adds, "He should be reserved and emotionally distant. It's very dangerous for him to be any other way."
Damon, whose career began in 1988 with one line in Mystic Pizza, now lives in Florida and keeps a fairly low profile. It wasn't always like that. He was a Hollywood golden boy in the late '90s with the release of such films as Good Will Hunting (for which he won an Oscar), The Rainmaker, Saving Private Ryan and The Talented Mr. Ripley, not to mention such dubious honours as being named one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world by People magazine.
He seems to have grown out of all that and into a steady career -- where, he says, he takes nothing for granted. "I'm always cautious, because it doesn't last. I just never wanted to get swept up in it, because then you get lazy, or you start making safer bets or you start to try to protect your beachhead, and that's a recipe for disaster. I think it's healthy to look at it as something that is always in transition because that is the way the industry is looking at its actors. We are commodities, kind of. You have to keep proving to the financiers that people want to see you, or they won't bankroll anything."
They will bankroll a third installment of the Bourne outings, however. And Damon has fond feelings for the character, lightweight though he may seem in comparison to the CIA heavy he plays in The Good Shepherd. But one goes along with the other. Being Jason Bourne in The Bourne Supremacy in 2004 and then again in The Bourne Ultimatum in 2007 (his 36th movie) has allowed him to take riskier roles in between in Syriana and The Departed.
"Bookended by the Bourne movies, I felt like I had a chance to make the movies I really wanted to make, that maybe were a little more challenging. I have a limited chance to choose certain movies."
He adds soberly: "It doesn't last forever. You guys see everybody come and go. I know the deal. I've been around. You breathe this rarefied air for a real short time, and there's an ebb and a flow to everything. And particularly given the choices I'm making and the material I tend to be drawn to," he says, smiling, "I can't be up here for long."
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