When you've got a lot of chips, it's easier to keep winning," Matthew Paige Damon confided the other evening as we settled into our seats for several hands of seven-card stud, high-low. We were hanging out in a private poker club in New York City, and none of the players had a clue that the baby-faced kid pulling up to the table was within days--perhaps hours--of becoming a Big Movie Star.
Yet they saw in Damon the same thing Hollywood does--an all-American beer-drinking dude, with an appealing self-assurance. The 27-year-old actor's gambling strategy was to raise, raise, raise--an approach that suited a wealthy young man whose annual salary just went north of $1 million, but whose cards weren't what you'd call a sure thing. Long after lower-paid mortals folded, Damon continued to bet like a winner; he'd arrived at the table with $200 and left only $20 poorer, which of course did nothing to deter the amiable grin that rarely leaves his soon-to-be-familiar face.
That may have been Damon's last lick of anonymity before he headed into the red-hot center of American celebrity, going from being a guy to being the Guy. Damon has begun a run of major Hollywood star turns, starting with Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker, following with the December release of Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting (from a script Damon co-wrote) and continuing next June with Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.
"Actors like Matt are in as good a position as they've ever been," observes Coppola, who chose Damon over fellow finalist Edward Norton for the lead in the new John Grisham star vehicle. "They've become the trademarks of the movies, not the directors. There's barely a movie that can be made without Cage or Ford or Pitt. Now they determine what movies get made." As for Damon's qualifications for joining the short list, Coppola says, "Matt has got the gift--and he's a writer in his own right. That gives him something special." That plus the fact that Damon's salary remains a fraction of his more famous peers, an attractive prospect to studios in search of new talent.
Damon is pleased but bewildered by the power at his disposal. "It's like I'm living somebody else's life," he had said as we wandered aimlessly and unrecognized around lower Manhattan a few days before the card game and a week before his face landed on the cover of Vanity Fair. "I don't have an apartment; my stuff is in a warehouse in New Jersey. I'm making three movies in a row for all this money... I'm not complaining, you know. But I mean, why is it all happening to me? And if people are expecting this much, will they be mad if I let them down? I don't want to be a flash in the pan. I don't want to lose it all."