Matt and Luciana Damon stepped out for lunch yesterday in LA. In terms of his work as an actor, it’s been a few months since Matt was on set, but production on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, about the “father of the atomic bomb”, is supposed to start in February. So Nolan’s going back to war times and this is likely going to be a Nolan-style epic, accompanied by lectures from him on how streaming ruins his kind of movies. 

 

Since this is Christopher Nolan, though, the cast is impressive. Cillian Murphy will play the title role and Emily Blunt is Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, his wife. The rest of the ensemble, in addition to Matt, includes Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, and Josh Hartnett. Oppenheimer is budgeted at $100 million and is scheduled for release in the summer of 2023, so they’re hoping for another Dunkirk-y blockbuster – and that confidence isn’t necessarily because of these actors, but on the strength of Nolan’s reputation as one of the few directors in the business who brings in business by their own name. 

Going back to Matt Damon though… 

Lately it’s not his acting that’s been making headlines but his … endorsing. I don’t know what it’s like where you live but every f-cking day, multiple times, he’s showing up on TV or in my feeds trying to tell me to put my money, real money, in crypto currency. 

 

I don’t think I have to explain the criticism – in the distant future when humans are half machine and we only live underground and we only interact through VR headsets, this might actually be a thing but right now, it’s a gamble – at best. This tweet pretty much says it: 

I also enjoyed this one: 

 

But there’s Matt Damon giving you a pep talk about why you should put your savings into crypto. And leveraging his “likeability”, his all-American good boyness, to convince you. But this is also what I was referring to last year in “Matt Damon, The Inscrutable Everyman” - he gets away with sh-t in a way that his best friend can’t. Ben Affleck has been relentlessly mocked, and in many, if not most, instances deservedly so, and eyerolled for all his Affleckisms, but Matt has always coasted through controversy, even when those controversies are, in the grand scheme, much more insidious. It’s not that Matt Damon, a multimillionaire, is making money from a commercial – all celebrities do this, we’re level on that playing field – it’s that it’s this specific product, if you can even call crypto a product because it’s not like it’s legitimately tangible in any comforting way. 

And he narrated Inside Job, the Oscar-winning documentary about the late 2000s financial crisis which was basically a stock market scam! 

But now… did you hear about this? It’s fresh news: 

 

This is one of those instances then when getting papped isn’t strategically timed. Because I heard about this and then he popped up on my photo agency feed and I’m like… 

…does it, though? 

Obviously it’s not Matt Damon’s fault, he has nothing to do with breach, but it’s still not a good look, like he’s the face of the brand right now! So what will this mean for those f-cking ads? Can we get through the weekend without seeing Matt Damon telling us to invest in a company that just got hacked?