The accelerated rise of the bright, fresh-faced, all-American-looking Matt Damon to the status of Hollywood golden boy began two years ago when he was 27 and he and Ben Affleck collected the best screenplay Oscar for Good Will Hunting, a low-budget picture which became a major commercial success. Damon followed it with the role of the title character in Steven Spielberg's award-winning Saving Private Ryan, and he earned a Golden Globe nomination for his chilly, complex portrayal of the amoral eponymous character in The Talented Mr Ripley. He was unlucky not to receive an Oscar nomination for it this week.
Four years ago, however, Damon was so disillusioned with working as a movie actor that he was on the verge of quitting to concentrate on his writing. Raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Damon was in his third year at Harvard when he left with a year to go in order to devote all his time to what seemed like a burgeoning movie career. He was encouraged by securing juicy early roles - as the rookie soldier in Walter Hill's Geronimo: An American Legend and as the preppy villain of School Ties - and he had starred in TV movies with established actors such as Brian Dennehy (Rising Son) and Tommy Lee Jones (The Good Old Boys). Then came what he assumed would be his big break, when director Ed Zwick cast him with Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan in the Gulf War drama, Courage Under Fire.
With characteristic zeal Damon immersed himself in his role as a guilt-ridden drug-addicted soldier who is starving himself to death. But he was omitted from the movie's promotional campaign which focused on Ryan and Washington. Damon reflected on that experience when he was in Berlin last weekend for the European premiere of The Talented Mr Ripley.
"I didn't know what a press kit was at that time," he says, "so when I read the reviews of the movie and nobody mentioned my name I was really upset. I was on medication and I was really hurt. I felt, I can't do it any better than that and if nobody notices then, what's the point?"
Behind his affable exterior, it is clear that his anger still simmers at the memory. "And then Coppola called," he says, perking up again. "It was lucky that he had seen the movie." Francis Coppola was casting his movie of the John Grisham novel The Rain- maker, and he cast Damon in the central role as the idealistic young attorney taking on corrupt corporate power.
However, as a result of his experience with Courage Under Fire, Damon's advice to aspiring actors is, "Don't do it. And for those who absolutely feel they have to do it, I tell them what a really, really hard business it is. I know it's hard for me to say that now because I've been so fortunate in the past few years."
There is, of course, another route for actors to take, as Damon and his close friend since high school, Ben Affleck, proved when they wrote the screenplay for Good Will Hunting. "One of the reasons Ben and I wrote it was to get jobs for ourselves as actors," says Damon. "We are planning to sit down together and write very soon. We have some ideas, but we figure we're going to get killed with our second movie, so we'll just take our time and do something we really like - and then take our criticism."
Like so many actors of his generation, Damon could have followed his breakthrough in The Rainmaker by allowing himself to be packaged in bland star vehicles which would be personally lucrative but creatively unfulfilling. Instead, he has opted to play the sinister central role of The Talented Mr Ripley, Anthony Minghella's film of the Patricia Highsmith novel which introduced her creation, the amoral Tom Ripley.
"Matt Damon is a revelation in the film," says Minghella. "For an actor on the verge of being a big movie star to choose to do this part is already extraordinary." Damon shrugs this off. "I don't think it's courageous to take a great script that Anthony Minghella is directing," he says. "I feel lucky to have that opportunity."
Minghella's film is a handsome and gripping thriller with Matt Damon in a revelatory performance as the insecure but ambitious Ripley who re-invents himself, chameleon-like, to appease his social-climbing and sexual desires. "I'd rather be a fake somebody," he says, "than a real nobody."
It opens in the summer of 1958 when Ripley, mistaken for a Princeton alumnus, is despatched to Italy by a wealthy shipbuilder to persuade his indolent son, Dickie (Jude Law), to return home. As the apparently gauche Ripley inveigles his way into the lives of Dickie and his American girlfriend, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), he finds himself irresistibly attracted to Dickie. The character of Dickie resembles an older version of the spoiled brat Damon played so effectively in School Ties. "Absolutely," he says, "and not unlike a number of people I met when I was at Harvard."
And he volunteers the view that he found similarities between himself and Ripley: "He is different to me in a lot of ways but not entirely. I really related to the loneliness that's at the centre of him, that desperate loneliness, and I think everyone's felt that way before, that sense of not belonging. I've felt like that before and I think there are a lot of things about him that are universal.
"Yet here you have somebody who's doing things that are morally reprehensible and you're asking the audience to accept him as their protagonist and even to identify with him. That, to me, was the real challenge of the role - and what was so unAmerican about the movie; in America most movies are generally black and white and you know who the hero is the whole time."
Preparing for the film Damon learned to play the piano and lost about 25 pounds for the role. "I wanted the suits to hang on him in a certain way," he explains, "and also for him to have a certain look for the scene on the beach, so he looks uncomfortable. The piano took a long time, between four and six hours a day for six to eight weeks, before I went to Italy. I had to learn the most basic things, such as how to sit at the piano. So much of how he walks and talks in the film was informed by that preparation.
"Generally, when I get a role, I'll try and do as much as possible beforehand of what the character does and that helps me with the character and the way I carry myself in a movie. I can't just take a role and then show up and start. I really need time to work on it and the more time I have the better. Even when we were shooting I would run on a treadmill for an hour a day after work, to unwind and keep my weight down."
He is a picture of discomfort in the aforementioned beach scene, where he first meets Dickie. Dickie is lounging and has a golden tan, while Ripley is porcelain-pallid, wearing hideous green swimming trunks and awkwardly carrying brown shoes.
`They painted me to look like that," Damon laughs. "Jude Law and I were sitting in the make-up chairs in the mornings and they were painting his body beautifully bronze while I was there next to him and they're painting me white. As for the swimming trunks, we got those months beforehand and everybody knew about them, but when we unveiled it on the beach they all still found it so funny."
Damon also gets to sing in the film, in an Italian nightclub sequence when he performs, almost whispers, My Funny Valentine. "I loved the music," he says. "A lot of the keys to Ripley are in the music. In terms of the singing, that was more Tom Ripley imitating Chet Baker, so I'm off the hook!"
Damon has been working virtually without a break for the past two years. He has just completed The Legend of Baggar Vance, which deals with a fictional 1931 golf game and one man's search for the authentic swing. Will Smith co-stars and Robert Redford directs. Before that Damon played the cowboy at the core of All the Pretty Horses, Billy Bob Thornton's film of the Cormac McCarthy novel, of which Damon says he is very proud.
When we talked in Berlin a few days before the Oscar nominations were announced this week, Damon was quite philosophical about the outcome. "Jude and I were talking about this last night," he says. "If we judge the movie by something external like that, if that's the yardstick by which we judge its success or failure, then we're really screwed because we're setting ourselves up for failure. I certainly don't expect it and I hope, if the movie is totally passed over, that it's not like we've somehow failed, because I really love this movie."
The Talented Mr Ripley will be released on Friday