JASON BOURNE: Matt Damon Talks About Returning to The Role and What's Changed

Yesterday, Universal debuted the first trailer and official title of the fifth Bourne film, which is now officially known as Jason Bourne. Check that out here if you haven't seen it yet, and you can take a look at the poster right here.

Matt Damon is reuniting with director Paul Greengrass to continue the story of the former government operative, and Damon spoke with EW in a recent interview and talked about returning to the character after so many years away, what kinds of changes we can expect in the new movie, and more.

On the real-life events that inspired the movie:

Since 2007, so much has changed. There’s been the financial collapse, the great recession, all these issues of cyber warfare and civil liberties – things that are slowly coming to into the zeitgeist as we start to grapple with what the future is going to look like. And so those are kind of somewhere in the stew of our story. If you look at the first three, they are films that are product of the Bush presidency. Thematically, they touch on things people were talking and thinking about during that presidency. This one feels like a movie about today.

On where we find Bourne when the movie begins:

Well I don’t know how much I should say. [Laughs] We talked a lot about what state he should be in, and where we came to was that if you found him fat and happy and content, you don’t really have a movie. So we talked about how at the end of Bourne Ultimatum, he gets his memory back and it kind of completed that identity journey for him. But does that complete things for the character or not? And the conclusion we came to is no – we find him in a very dark and tortured place. He’s living with the same things as he was before, and then he goes to find Julia Stiles’ character, who basically says, “Just because you remember everything, doesn’t mean you know everything.” So you find him in a place that’s dark and unresolved.

This is the completion of this journey that started in the Bourne Identity. It’s part of the first three [movies], it’s not a whole new chapter. It feels like the conclusion, even though we’re not saying it’s the conclusion, it feels like the conclusion of my identity journey. It goes deeper than Ultimatum, basically.

On breakout star Alicia Vikander's role in the film:

You have to do something great and new, and Alicia is our great and new. She plays a new character we’re introducing, and she’s a specialist in cyber. Instead of just the three arenas of warfare — air, land and sea — there’s now this fourth element: cyber. The implications of that are huge, and she’s representing that in the movie. We also have Tommy Lee Jones in the movie, and he’s kind of representing the analog CIA in the way the old guard thinks. Those two go head to head quite a bit. Introducing those two new characters, I think, is probably one of the biggest trailblazing things we’ve done in this movie. One thing about these movies is that the casts are so good. I always feel so amazed at the people we get. If we have any kind of formula, it’s hiring the very best actors we can to fill out these roles, and Alicia and Tommy Lee are two absolute heavyweights.

There's more in the full interview at EW, so if you're a Bourne fan, head that way and check the rest out. Jason Bourne blasts into theaters on July 29th.