Matt Damon had to lose a lot of weight for Nolan’s Odyssey
“I haven’t been this light since high school!”
He will do anything for Christopher Nolan.
Matt Damon had to lose considerable weight in order to play Ulysses in The Odyssey. The actor, who reunites with the director after Interstellar And Oppenheimerrevealed on the Kelce brothers podcast, New Heightshaving lost around fifteen kilos and dropped the needle on his scale to 75 kg. A figure he hadn’t had since high school.
“First he asked me to have a big beard like yours for a year” Damon tells host Jason Kelce (see below).”And then I was in great shape. I lost a lot of weights.” He details:
“Christopher (Nolan) wanted me to be lean but powerful. Because of another thing I did with my doctor: I stopped eating gluten. Before, I was shooting films weighing 85 or 90 kilos. And here I was 75 kilos throughout the shoot. I haven’t been this light since high school. It took a lot of training and a very strict diet.”
A radical transformation for someone who has already had to – conversely – gain weight for his roles. In 2009, for The Informant!the actor had gained 15 kilos in “eating like crazy and drinking dark beer”. He says: “Between meals on set, I would grab a McDonald’s No.1 menu and add Doritos on top. It was absolute paradise…”.
Beyond his physical preparation, Matt Damon admits to having been amazed by the technical prowess of The Odysseywhich will be the first Hollywood film shot entirely on Imax cameras. “Imax cameras are really loud. It looks like a blender right in front of your face. We’ve never had dialogue scenes like that in Imax.”he explains.
“We could never have done these conversations with a normal Imax camera, they wouldn’t have heard us. They built a huge device around the camera for the dialogues, with a system of mirrors so that the alignment of the gaze remained natural. All the work that was necessary for that… Nolan wanted to do it 100% in Imax, and he did it!”
The release of The Odyssey is scheduled for next July 15 in France.
