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He's right to worry. Hollywood anoints these new young stars with alarming frequency, and can abandon them just as fast when they stumble. But for the moment, there's not much time left for Damon to consider such questions. He's too busy. He just turned down an offer to star in the next film by Ang Lee, who directed the Oscar-nominated Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm. That was so he could do the next film from the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, Anthony Minghella. Damon will play the title role in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Minghella's adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel about a charming con man driven to murder. Until recently, scripts sent to him had multiple sets of fingerprints on them; this one came straight from Tom Cruise's reject pile. "There's something so apple pie about him," says Minghella. "You know he was the best-looking kid in his school, won all the awards at track and field and dated the most popular girl."
The second son of a now divorced college-professor mom and tax-expert dad, Damon grew up in Cambridge, Mass., watching movies, studying the acting styles of idols like Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall and plotting his acting career. His mother, a child-development expert, encouraged her sons to engage in the creative use of blocks and the fun of make-believe. It worked: Damon's brother Kyle, 30, became a sculptor, and young Matt started acting at age 12. By the time he was 17, he'd already got his first movie role, with one line in the 1988 film Mystic Pizza.
His breakthrough came as a Gulf War veteran turned heroin addict in the 1996 drama Courage Under Fire. In a move reminiscent of De Niro's weight gain for Raging Bull, Damon dropped 40 lbs. for a two-day scene opposite Denzel Washington. It created an anorexia-like medical condition (from which he only recently recovered), but the intensity of his performance convinced the industry that Damon was a serious actor.
By that time Damon had taken steps to ensure that Hollywood would take notice of more than his acting. With Stallone-like hubris, he and best friend Ben Affleck--another hot actor, who starred in Chasing Amy and grew up two blocks away from Damon--wrote the screenplay for Good Will Hunting, based on a play Damon had started writing as a Harvard student. (He still has two semesters to go for his degree.) Damon and Affleck attached themselves to the project as stars. The script--about the struggles of a young working-class math genius in South Boston--sold to Castle Rock Entertainment for $500,000 and gave Damon his first glimpse into the Hollywood power machine.
"We had really serious creative differences with them" is all he says about the Castle Rock experience. But other sources close to the movie say Damon and Affleck became dismayed when they realized Castle Rock never intended to show the script to an established director but instead planned to hand it off to Castle Rock partner Andrew Scheinman, whose only previous directing credit was the forgettable 1994 movie Little Big League. The young actors returned their material to the marketplace, where Miramax bought it from Castle Rock. Commitments from director Van Sant and co-star Robin Williams made the project happen the way they always dreamed it would. This also led to an ongoing romance between Damon and his co-star Minnie Driver.