Matt Damon Has Reportedly Been Cast In This Marvel Sequel
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the general Hollywood equivalent of British actors and Harry Potter: everyone ends up in a movie at some point, whether they had more than twenty lines or just a brief cameo. The latest rumor in that arena is that famed Academy Award-winning actor/director/screenwriter Matt Damon has signed on to be in the fourth Thor film, Thor: Love and Thunder, directed by famed Academy Award-winning actor/director/screenwriter Taika Waititi.
Now, Damon has been in the MCU before in Thor: Ragnarok, playing an actor playing Loki in a stage play of Thor: The Dark World for Odin who is actually Loki in disguise. Simple enough. His brief role has fans speculating that he will be playing the same Faux-Loki actor as he did in Ragnarok, but with a potentially larger role. There have been very few details released about Love and Thunder, so it's even possible that he'll just play a new role entirely, and we can look back on his blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in the previous film.
However, that actually seems a bit unlikely, given that the actor was flown to Sidney, Australia to begin his mandatory COVID-19 quarantine ahead of shooting. It would be odd to have an A-list celebrity fly from wherever he was in a private jet to Australia, then quarantine him for an extended period of time just to have him film two minutes of footage. Might as well just have him paint a wall green, dress up, do the scene, then send the footage to the production team so that they can CG him into the movie. Emails, authentic period appropriate Asgardian garb, and green paint are a lot cheaper than private jet fuel, as anyone who only goes halfway on their high school theater projects already knows.
The time and effort to get him down there ahead of filming does imply that he has a larger role this time. Given that Waititi is one of the most creative directors working in Hollywood, and how good Ragnarok was, it's likely that he has something fun in store for Damon. His films tend to be a lot of fun to watch, and you can tell the actors are having fun making the movie. I'd bet that Chris Hemsworth had a lot more of a good time being in a humorous MCU film than the more serious fare that they sometimes put out.
Damon was only in Ragnarok due to his friendship with Waititi, so it was a fun little nod to that. However, that was before a global pandemic hit, so it's a lot more of a chore to film anything with the quarantine requirements for film shoots. But who knows? Love and Thunder isn't coming out until February 11th, 2022, so we have a while to speculate. A year (as of this writing) is a long time when it comes to Hollywood productions. He could have anything from a two minute cameo to an oddball character who points Thor in the direction of the MacGuffin he has to find to save the world (think Benicio Del Toro in Guardians of the Galaxy) to an actual character that Thor interacts with throughout the film. Or he could be the toadie of the real bad guy, Gorr the God Butcher, hopefully not method acted by Christian Bale.
Maybe not, though. Maybe it is just some brief, cute nod to the friendship between the two filmmakers, and the audience gets a small chuckle out of it before we go back to watching Thor fight the bad guy. It would be interesting to see Damon and Waititi become the new Burton/Depp or Rian Johnson/Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Anything is possible at this point.
Or, heck, maybe Damon was sitting around at home eating his third bowl of cereal without milk and binging some random Netflix while wearing a ratty t-shirt and sweatpants and bouncing a ball off of the wall like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, like the rest of us, when he got a call about doing a 20-second cameo for a film made by a buddy of his, and decided that that sounded better than the quarantining he was already doing.
Source(s): The Direct