Universal Pictures
'The Odyssey' star Matt Damon had a female stunt double for a certain sequence
Matt Damon, who turns 56 years old this year, clearly put in tons of work in the gym in order to play Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. That literal heavy-lifting, however, doesn’t mean he’s unwilling to give credit where its due elsewhere.
During a recent podcast interview, The Odyssey star Matt Damon revealed that he had a female stunt double for the scene that features the Laestrygonians — the cannibalistic giants from Homer’s epic.
Matt Damon says his female stunt double on The Odyssey had the “greatest arms he’s ever seen”
According to Damon, the forced perspective shots required seven-foot-tall stuntmen to play the giants looming over Odysseus and his warriors. To properly sell the scale of the effect, Nolan needed someone under five feet to double for Damon in certain shots.
“When we did the forced perspective stuff of the Laestrygonians — I don’t know if there’s been a thing about how we did it — there were these stunt men who were all seven feet,” he said of how they filmed the scenes with the giant warriors in The Odyssey.
“And then they got stuntmen who were under five feet, and so my double was a woman, a female stunt performer, who had the greatest arms I’ve ever seen,” Damon explained on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
“So there are those shots in the movie where you see these giants looming over me, and so it was almost 100 percent my arms in the movie, but you gotta give it up where it’s due.”
In addition to Matt Damon as Odysseus, The Odyssey also stars Robert Pattinson as Antinous, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena, Lupita Nyong’o as both Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Himesh Patel as Eurylochus, John Leguizamo as Eumaeus, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Samantha Morton as Circe, Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, and Benny Safdie as Agamemnon.
The Odyssey opened to $264 million at the global box office in its debut weekend and is currently playing in theaters.