LOS ANGELES -- Matt Damon still remembers risking a stiff neck upon meeting Francois Pienaar, the character he plays in Clint Eastwood's Invictus.
Pienaar was the captain of South Africa's World Cup-winning rugby team, and the determined point-man in Nelson Mandela's plan to rally the fractured post-apartheid country around a sport that was widely seen as the "white man's game."
"I got to South Africa, and the very first day Francois invited me and Morgan (Freeman, who plays Mandela) to his house for a gourmet dinner. And I remember I rang the doorbell and he opened the door and I looked up at him.
"And the first thing I ever said to Francois was, 'I look much bigger on film.' And he laughed and gave me a big hug and took me into his house and that was it."
Still, going from playing a flabby desk-jockey in The Informant! to a world-class rugby player in Invictus was a major concern going in.
"I called Clint and I said, 'Clint, this guy is huge. I'm five-ten.' And he said, 'Oh hell, let me worry about that. You worry about that other stuff.'
"And I said, 'All right. I'll worry about everything else, you worry about the fact that I'll need to grow six inches to play the guy.' "
Mandela and Pienaar became an odd couple when Mandela overruled a decision by his African National Congress to disband the national Springboks rugby team.
Instead, he envisioned the team becoming a symbol of change and non-recrimination. Some go as far as crediting that World Cup with helping avoid civil war.
"I watched the movie," Pienaar says. "And when Matt goes to meet Madiba (Mandela's nickname) for the first time, the nervous emotion came back of meeting the first black president of South Africa. 'What is he going to ask you? Why does he want to see you?' He puts you at ease right away, he really gets into your head. I thought I was in the presence of a very wise person who had a sense of responsibility to heal."
Damon says he felt portraying someone integral to a crucial moment in history inspired him to lose the weight, among other things (including learning an Afrikaner accent). "I had a good time putting the weight on (for The Informant!) and then a tough time reshaping the weight.
"I was in the gym every day and Francois came with me to the gym a few times. This is his life, I don't want to embarrass him. If Jason Bourne looks a little flabby, that's on me. This is the fictionalization of somebody's actual life.
"I didn't want to let him down -- or it wouldn't be for lack of effort. Which is what that (Springboks) team was famous for actually, for going the extra mile and knowing themselves. 'Yes, we may not be the most talented team, but we're gonna be the fittest.' "
Damon was 19 when he got to see Mandela in the flesh when he visited Boston as part of a world tour. And he recalls in high school being handed a "Free Nelson Mandela" ribbon when the ANC leader's 27 years in prison was reaching a flashpoint as an international cause celebre. "I had an old scrapbook my mother put together, a photo album of pictures from my childhood. And I saw it recently, and the Free Nelson Mandela ribbon was in there from 1988."
Pienaar's own best memory of Mandela came "when we had a function in honour of the Springboks after the World Cup, and my fiancee, my wife now, was there. And I said, 'Madiba, would you mind at some point saying hello to my fiancee, Nerine, and I only mentioned her name once. And he said, 'Of course.' And later on, he actually came to our table and walked over with bodyguards and everything, and he took Nerine's hand and he said, 'Nerine, would you feel offended if I come to your wedding?' That's the nature of this incredible leader we were blessed to have."
Invictus (the title means "unconquerable"), Damon says, "is telling a story that I think is a wonderful thing -- to remind everybody in South African and around the world, that if we listen to the better angels of our nature, we can create solutions to serious problems."
And would he ever play rugby again? "Hell, no," Damon says with a laugh.
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