He's not short. For some reason this is the first thing people want to know when they hear you have met Matt Damon. "He's short, right?" the inquiries come. "How tall is he?" "Is he a Pygmy or what?" He's actually 5 ft. 11 in., but still, the fact that the rest of us are not Matt Damon--have no Oscar, have never kissed Winona Ryder and are not making $7 million a movie--would be no more palatable even if we could put him in the "good-looking but short" box with, say, Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson.
It's just our puny way of kicking out at an industry that manufactures a product so completely irresistible to so many of us: the celebrity. And in the 29-year-old Damon, the star factory has found a mother lode of raw material: charm, good looks, an even temperament, smarts, a relish for hard work, devotion to his mom. But if it makes you feel any better, Matt Damon feels your pain. He didn't used to be him either.
"There are times I've been rejected that would spin your head around," says Damon. "You wouldn't believe I sat there and let people say stuff like that to me." Before The Rainmaker and Good Will Hunting--the one-two punch that threw him into the spotlight and led to six more back-to-back roles, including his latest, in The Talented Mr. Ripley--Damon struggled for seven years to get enough work to feed himself. But tough as those years were, they are eclipsed in his memory by an experience he had when he was nine or 10. "I moved to a neighboring city, and I really wanted to go back to my old school and see my friends," says Damon. "And my mother came up with this idea: 'Well, why don't you go back and spend a day there?'" But when she called and asked whether her son could return to say goodbye and achieve some closure, the principal said no. "I couldn't understand it," says Damon, his indignation still palpable. "The feeling of rejection was so deep." His mother, a professor of early-childhood education, wrote a stinging letter to the principal, which the young Damon carried around for weeks. "I remember thinking, 'Someday this person will be in a position of needing something from me,'" he says.
So although it might seem that if one were making a movie about a charismatic, handsome, wealthy young man and the lonely misfit who desperately wants to be him, one would cast Damon in the glamour boy's role, he says he identifies with the dork. "I really relate to Ripley," says Damon. "I always did. I think most people will." And while there are differences--Damon says he played Ripley as a virgin, which, given his dating history (Claire Danes and Minnie Driver are two of the famous ones), must have been a stretch--there are also similarities. Damon and Ripley are both from the Boston area. Both are eager to please, polite and attentive to whomever they're with. Both work incredibly hard on the project at hand. For Ripley, Damon spent a month learning to play the piano and perfected Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring on the harmonium for a scene he knew would be cut from the movie. "I'm a writer. I knew what would be the first to go," says Damon, who won his Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting with Ben Affleck. "But it wasn't a waste of time, because playing the piano informed the way Ripley walked and the way he sat." Besides, he says, flashing his extra-wide grin, "now I can play Bach and Chopsticks and nothing in between."