Matt Damon Kills It in ‘The Odyssey.’ These Are His 5 Other Greatest Roles

Watching Christopher Nolan’s sweeping new epic The Odyssey last week, a weird thought occurred to me. Is Matt Damon actually, well, kind of underrated? I know, I know—at first glance, that feels like a reach for a guy who has been nominated for three acting Oscars, is essentially the American Bond by way of being Jason Bourne, and has elevated no end of modern Hollywood staples from Good Will Hunting to The Departed. There is clearly some consensus that the 55-year-old is very good at what he does. And yet, it feels as though he is strangely overlooked compared to the widely-accepted GOATs of his generational cohort: the Leos, the Bales, the Joaquin Phoenixs.Maybe it’s because, despite the three goes-around, he has yet to get one of his acting nominations over the line. (Woe is him, having to make do with a measly screenwriting Oscar for the last three decades.) Maybe it’s the fact that he looks so staggeringly ordinary—a trait he has often weaponized to great success. Maybe my skull is packed with parasitic brain worms and I have simply missed the fact that everyone thinks he is the second coming of James Stewart.Whatever the case, with The Odyssey, we shall continue to overlook Hollywood’s everyman-par-excellence at our peril. He absolutely rips it up as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, a figure of legend who Damon portrays as pointedly unexceptional—a deeply human man teeming with flaws and more war trauma than his character in Saving Private Ryan—beyond the yoked muscles and impressive beard. It’s probably his best work yet: that fourth acting Oscar nomination is a lock, and it might just be the one that gets him over the line. It got me thinking: Hey, I’m actually quite a big Damon fan. And you should be too. But where to start? Well, for my money, these movies are his best.Good Will Hunting (1997)First off, we’re throwing it back to the beginning with the film that made a then 28-year-old Damon—with his boy band bangs and swoony blues—an ascendant Hollywood star. (It also announced his screenwriting talents alongside Ben Affleck; their bubbly, Labrador-coded Oscar acceptance speech is the most wholesome thing ever.) His part as the titular Will, a seemingly unremarkable janitor who, as it turns out, has a bigger brain than Einstein, demonstrated a leading-man knack beyond his years—bouncing off Robin Williams, who plays his jovial mentor, like they’re lifelong pals.The Departed (2006)That Matt Damon seems—and frankly, looks—like such a regular guy is a superpower that he has leveraged plenty of times across his career. (It also helps that he usually deploys an understated performance style, hardly drawing attention to himself as other movie stars do.) In The Departed, the Martin Scorsese cat-and-mouse crime epic about crooked cops in Boston, it enables him to believably play a mob plant within the police force; another actor might not so credibly fly under the radar. Instead, he goes toe-to-toe with the likes of DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson, quieter but never overshadowed. Turns out that, despite all of the boy-next-door qualities on show in Good Will Hunting, he can play one helluva slime bag.The Martian (2015)The Lonely Guy in Space has become a staple sci-fi movie trope, platforming some of our greatest modern performers to flex their acting chops: a weary Brad Pitt in Ad Astra, a variously vibrant and depressive Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary. In The Martian, Damon runs the gamut of emotion as Dr. Mark Watney, an astronaut marooned on the red planet, forced to fend for himself while he awaits rescue, killing time by tending to his potatoes and recording video diaries like he’s taking part in an intergalactic Big Brother special. It’s a typically understated Damon performance that elevates the movie tenfold; well, his performance basically is the movie, given the whole thing revolves around his increasingly agonizing isolation, with sparing cutaways to the rescue operation on Earth. Another ordinary—albeit atypically competent, and extremely clever—dude forced into doing heroic things. That’s the Damon wheelhouse, baby.Ford v Ferrari (2019)Damon and his co-star Christian Bale, playing a team of maverick racers prepping to hit the asphalt at Le Mans in 1966, are a blistering yin-and-yang combo in James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari. Their performance styles couldn’t make for a greater contrast—Damon’s unshowy naturalism, Bale dialing every single facial expression up to 11—and yet they somehow compliment each other. The result is one of the great, character-driven crowdpleasers about macho guys who are hellbent on defying death to achieve greatness, with shades of Days of Thunder, and a little Top Gun.Oppenheimer (2023)Though he boasts less runtime than the bill-topping Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. in Christopher Nolan’s last film, the Oscar-winning biopic of the guy who invented the atomic bomb (and lived to regret it), Damon leaves just as much of an impression. He plays General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project: in line with his reliable everyman persona, he takes the role of grounded foil to the nigh-on operatic genius of Murphy’s Oppenheimer. He’s gruff, hardy, direct—and steeped in aura, which is only partially down to the mustache.This article originally appeared in British GQ.