Matt Damon Kills It in The ‘Odyssey. These Are His 5 Other Greatest Roles

Watching Christopher Nolan’s sweeping new epic The Odyssey last week, a weird thought occurred to me. Is Matt Damon actually, well, kind of underrated? I know, I know—at first glance, that feels like a reach for a guy who has been nominated for three acting Oscars, is essentially the American Bond by way of being Jason Bourne, and has elevated no end of modern Hollywood staples from Good Will Hunting to The Departed. There is clearly some consensus that the 55-year-old is very good at what he does. And yet, it feels as though he is strangely overlooked compared to the widely-accepted GOATs of his generational cohort: the Leos, the Bales, the Joaquin Phoenixs.

Maybe it’s because, despite the three goes-around, he has yet to get one of his acting nominations over the line. (Woe is him, having to make do with a measly screenwriting Oscar for the last three decades.) Maybe it’s the fact that he looks so staggeringly ordinary—a trait he has often weaponized to great success. Maybe my skull is packed with parasitic brain worms and I have simply missed the fact that everyone thinks he is the second coming of James Stewart.

Whatever the case, with The Odyssey, we shall continue to overlook Hollywood’s everyman-par-excellence at our peril. He absolutely rips it up as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, a figure of legend who Damon portrays as pointedly unexceptional—a deeply human man teeming with flaws and more war trauma than his character in Saving Private Ryan—beyond the yoked muscles and impressive beard. It’s probably his best work yet: that fourth acting Oscar nomination is a lock, and it might just be the one that gets him over the line. It got me thinking: Hey, I’m actually quite a big Damon fan. And you should be too. But where to start? Well, for my money, these movies are his best.

Good Will Hunting (1997)