Matt Damon and David Letterman Pop into The Gilded Age Just for Funzies

IF YOU’RE NOT familiar with HBO’s The Gilded Age, it’s a pretty easy show to explain. Set in New York City during the titular era—the rapidly changing 1880s—the show is an exploration of the rich-people trials and tribulations of a new money family (led by Carrie Coon and Morgan “Train Daddy” Spector) and their neighbors, an old money family (led by Christine Baranski).One of the show’s most important aspects is its production design, with intricately built sets and elaborately planned costumes helping to transport its viewers back nearly 150 years. Immersion is the name of the game.With a setup like that, The Gilded Age is just about the last show where you’d expect to see a couple of our most recognizable modern stars walk directly across the screen—but that’s just what Matt Damon and David Letterman did, less than 10 minutes into the show’s season 4 premiere.Damon, the Oscar-winning movie star who earlier this year led Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Netflix’s The Rip, and Letterman, the legendary talk show host, walked across the screen in full costume, saying nothing, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment.As it turns out, according to a story published by Vulture, the whole thing was born from Letterman’s lifelong desire to make a surprise appearance in something as a background actor, something that began way back in 1977 when he saw a fellow comedian friend slyly appear in the background of a scene in Annie Hall. In recent years, Letterman has apparently come close to shooting background scenes in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, the upcoming Michael B. Jordan-directed version of The Thomas Crown Affair, and Black Rabbit alongside Jason Bateman—but for one reason or another, none of them came to be.Letterman filmed an upcoming episode of his current show, the Netflix interview series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, with Damon, and discovered that Damon and Ben Affleck began their careers as background actors, and, for the sake of the bit, figured this would be the perfect opportunity to see his dream come to fruition. “We thought, Okay, this could be the perfect opportunity,” Next Guest showrunner Isabel Richardson explained to Vulture. “It’d be really fun for Dave to do this with Academy Award–winner Matt Damon, and it tied into his origin story really well.”Damon, luckily, was into the idea too—and they made it happen. “It was a kind of hysterical moment when our production supervisor Leah Baker came up to me on set and was like, ‘Well, I have a kind of funny, interesting question: Would you like Dave Letterman and Matt Damon to be background on our set one day?’” Gilded Age showrunner Churchill said in the same Vulture story. “I just started laughing.”Surprise appearances and cameos have long been a part of Damon’s playbook. Marvel fans certainly remember his brief appearances in movies like Deadpool 2 and Thor: Ragnarok, while fans of Damon’s frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh’s movies won’t forget his surprise turns in movies like No Sudden Move and Che: Part Two. He even appeared in a very brief role in Ethan Coen’s Drive Away Dolls after working with Ethan and his brother Joel on the 2010 hit True Grit. Perhaps Damon’s most memorable (and truly most random) cameo comes in the 2004 comedy Eurotrip, though. He appears early in the film as Donnie, the lead singer of an alt-rock band who sings a song about the affair he was apparently having with the main character’s girlfriend. “Scotty Doesn’t Know” is a pillar of both 2000s pop-punk and that era’s teen sex comedy movement, and Damon’s completely out-of-nowhere cameo is a huge reason why.And, look, HBO seems to enjoy this kind of thing anyway. Just last month, we spotted the University of Nebraska’s head football coach Matt Rhule in the final episode of Lanterns. Does his appearance make sense in a show set in Nebraska? Sure. Did we ever expect to see Matt Rhule in an acclaimed, highly watched HBO drama set in a superhero world? No, we certainly did not.It’s fun (and probably a bit trippy at first) to come to grips with seeing who you think you’re seeing. And if, somehow, you don’t know who either of those two are, you probably won’t notice at all and won’t think a thing. And isn’t that how all great cameos should go, really?Watch The Gilded Age HereEvan is the culture editor for Men's Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn't.