Matt Damon has few regrets — except turning down James Cameron‘s 2009 “Avatar,” and he’s now explaining why.
The actor, who plays army general Leslie Groves in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” detailed in a recent Chris Wallace interview why he had to walk away from starring in Cameron’s $2.8-billion-grossing original space epic. Damon previously said that his salary plus backend box office profits on “Avatar” would have netted the actor at least $250 million.
“I’m sure it’s the most money an actor ever turned down, you know?” said Damon, who at the time was under contract to complete the action-espionage “Bourne” series. By the time “Avatar” production ramped up, Damon had completed “The Bourne Identity,” “The Bourne Supremacy,” and was shooting 2007’s “The Bourne Ultimatum,” with “Legacy” and “Jason Bourne” still to come.
“I had a contract,” Damon said. “I was in the middle of shooting the ‘Bourne’ movie and I knew that we were going to need work at the end, and I had to get it all the way to the finish line, and I would have to leave the movie kind of early and leave them in the lurch a little bit and I didn’t want to do that. I desperately wanted to work with Cameron. I mean, because he worked so rarely.”
Damon said of his choice, “I don’t know how I could have left all my friends in the lurch. You know what I mean?”
Damon said that while writing director Gus van Sant’s 2012 drama “Promised Land” with John Krasinski, he and Krasinski “were in my kitchen and it was a Saturday morning and we were on a break and I tell him about ‘Avatar,’ and he launches himself out of the chair. He starts pacing the kitchen, he goes, ‘Nothing in your life would be different today if you had done that movie, except you and I would be having this conversation in space.’”
But Cameron doesn’t hold a grudge. While promoting “Avatar: The Way of Water,” the Oscar-winning director said he still wants Matt Damon to star in an “Avatar” installment even after turning down the original.
“He’s beating himself up over this, and I really think, Matt, you’re kind of like one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Get over it. But he had to do another ‘Bourne’ film which was on his runway and there’s nothing he could do about that and so he had to regretfully decline,” Cameron told BBC 1.
But while Cameron said Damon “must” do another “Avatar” movie, it came with a caveat: “he doesn’t get 10 percent. Fuck that.”
