Matt Damon Had To Negotiate With His Wife To Work with Christopher Nolan During Couple's Therapy

Matt Damon does not want to miss any kind of opportunity to work with director Christopher Nolan and he was willing to put his break from acting on hold and his relationship with his wife in jeopardy to make sure that he was able to work with Nolan when the opportunity presented itself again.

Damon previously appeared in Nolan’s Interstellar, but if the director called him again, he didn’t want to have to say no. After appearing in three movies in 2021, Damon needed to take a break from acting so that he could spend time with his wife and family.

While he and his wife were working out the terms of this break during couples therapy, Damon agreed that he would take some time off with one important caveat… if Nolan called and asked him to be in a movie. Not long after, Nolan offered Damon a role in Oppenheimer, causing the actor to invoke his clause from therapy.

During an interview with Entertainment Weekly’s Around the Table, Damon shared:

“This is going to sound made up, but it’s actually true. I had — not to get too personal — negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off. I had been in Interstellar, and then Chris put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation, but I actually negotiated in couples therapy ­— this is a true story — the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called. This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you. He just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household.”

That must’ve been an interesting conversation with the couples therapist.

Oppenheimer is based on the 2005 book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, and it tracks the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II through the eyes of theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who ran the Manhattan Project that led to the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II. He is joined by Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. 

The movie also stars Florence Pugh as psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie plays theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano plays Robert Serber, Josh Hartnett plays pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence, along with Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Dane DeHaan, Dylan Arnold, David Krumholtz, Alden Ehrenreich, and Matthew Modine. 

The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. Oppenheimer is filmed in a combination of IMAX® 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography including, for the first time ever, sections in IMAX® black and white analogue photography. 

Oppenheimer opens in theaters on July 21, 2023.