Matt Damon Reveals He Turned Down a $250+ Million 'Avatar' Role

Matt Damon and Christian Bale are on the cover of British GQ‘s November 2019 issue, out on October 4.

Here’s what the Ford v Ferrari actors had to say…

Matt Damon, on turning down the $250 million+ Avatar role: “Jim Cameron offered me Avatar. And when he offered it to me, he goes, ‘Now, listen. I don’t need anybody. I don’t need a name for this, a named actor. If you don’t take this, I’m gonna find an unknown actor and give it to him, because the movie doesn’t really need you. But if you take the part, I’ll give you 10 percent of [Avatar profits]…I told John Krasinski this story when we were writing Promised Land…he goes, ‘If you had done that movie, nothing in your life would be different. Nothing in your life would be different at all. Except that, right now, we would be having this conversation in space.’ So, yeah. I’ve left more money on the table than any actor actually. [GQ has since done the sums on this: Damon could have been a quarter of a billion dollars up].”

On his bigger regret: “I mean, the bigger thing still to this day, my bigger regret is – it would have caused a problem for Paul Greengrass and for all my friends on The Bourne Ultimatum, so I couldn’t do it – but Cameron said to me in the course of that conversation, ‘Well, you know, I’ve only made six movies.’ I didn’t realize that. He works so infrequently, but his movies, you know all of them. So it feels like he’s made more than he has. I realized in having to say no that I was probably passing on the chance to ever work with him. So that sucked and that’s still brutal. But my kids are all eating. I’m doing OK.”

Christian Bale on his acting technique: “One of [my] first jobs ever was with Rowan Atkinson and I think I look at him as the template. He was playing…The Nerd, it was called, by Larry Shue. He would come out, we’d say hello, but he didn’t really socialize. None of us knew him – it was before he did Mr. Bean. And he would just become this character, but before he went on stage. And I would just watch him; I would see him becoming a character. I was mesmerized. And then he just stayed in character for the whole night. And it wasn’t until the whole thing was finished that he invited me to say hello and that I actually spoke to him for the first time. It dawned on me that was my learning phase. I went, ‘Oh, that’s how it’s done then, is it? OK, great.’”

For more from Matt Damon and Christian Bale, head to gq-magazine.co.uk.