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Damon began making his lofty ambitions clear as early as 1993, when, after small but memorable performances in the 1992 film School Ties and 1993's Geronimo: An American Legend, he was offered a part in the Sharon Stone movie The Quick and the Dead--a highly coveted job for an actor still sleeping on a friend's couch. But Damon didn't like the script and wanted to pass. "You know what I did last night? I watched Bullitt," he remembers telling his agents. "Robert Duvall drives a cab in that movie, and he has, like, four lines, but he was totally believable and he was really good and at the end of the day, he was in Bullitt. He's in all these great movies because he doesn't do this kind of thing." The role later went to Leonardo DiCaprio.
All that has changed. "The funny thing is," Damon told me last week, "that as soon as you get big, the studios send you these scripts that they've been trying to get made for 20 years, that were originally written for Dustin Hoffman. They've been sitting on the shelf. You get their old standbys." What he didn't mention is that the roles also come with $2 million offers.
But for now Damon is making his choices on the basis of the part, not the paycheck. He seems content with the $600,000 he will be paid to appear in Rounders, the poker movie he's getting ready to shoot for Miramax. ("They've been great to me," says Damon.) It's from a first script by two unproduced young screenwriters and will be directed by The Last Seduction's John Dahl, who after four pictures has yet to make a major commercial success. No one seems to be very worried about its prospects, though. Maybe that's because the whole project is built around a hot young movie star.