WHILE ODYSSEUS WAS mostly known for his wits rather than his muscles, Christopher Nolan had a very specific vision for the character for his film The Odyssey. Matt Damon, who plays the eponymous character, was consequently required to get leaner while adding the muscle of a Greek warrior. As a result, he got down to a weight he hasn’t been since high school.
“I was in really good shape. I lost a lot of weight,” Damon told Jason Kelce on the New Heights podcast. “[Nolan] wanted me lean but strong… I used to walk around at between 185 and 200 [84-90kg], and I did that whole movie at 167 [75kg]. And I haven’t been that light since high school.”
How did Damon do it? He was already rather lean at 90kg before production began, so getting down to 75kg was never going to be easy. “It was a lot of training and a really strict diet,” he said. To be more specific, Damon said that the biggest change in his diet was that he “stopped eating gluten.”
Damon’s Odyssey prep is a far cry from some of his previous roles. He gained 15kg for 2009’s The Informant by “eating like crazy and drinking dark beer,” he told Entertainment Weekly at the time. “Between meals on set, I’d eat McDonald’s and then Doritos on top of it. It was absolute heaven.”
We’ll see if Damon’s hard work has paid off on the big screen. The Odyssey is in theatres July 17.
