Matt Damon once turned down a staggering amount of money to star to star in a film.
Damon is one of the biggest names in Hollywood having starred in blockbusters like Good Will Hunting, The Martian, Oppenheimer, and the Bourne franchise.
With his pretty stellar track record in mind, it’s no surprise that directors are queuing up to work with the 54-year-old.
One director who was keen to collaborate with Damon was James Cameron, best known for Titanic and The Terminator movies.
Back in 2009, Cameron’s movie Avatar finally hit theatres after years of hard work.
The film boasts a star studded cast including Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver – and Damon could have also been on the roster, but he said no.
Speaking in 2021, Damon revealed how he actually turned down the biggest payday of his entire career when Cameron offered him a certain role.
What’s more, he was also willing to give up ten percent of the whole film if Damon would star in it.
But the actor explained why he had to decline the offer.
Matt Damon turned down a huge payday by not starring in Avatar (Bruce Glikas/WireImage)
He said at the time: “James Cameron offered me ten percent of Avatar if I did it, but I was working on post-production for The Bourne Ultimatum.”
So, given that the film went on to take more at the box office than any other film in history at the time, with critics praising the film and audiences blown away by the special effects, Damon would have also received a stupendous paycheque.
If he’d agreed to appear as Jake Sully – a role which ultimately went to Sam Worthington – he’d have banked around $250 million.
Damon further quipped: “I will go down in history. You will never meet an actor who turned down more money.”
In the years that have followed, Cameron had joked that Damon should simply ‘get over it’.
James Cameron has jokingly urged Damon to ‘get over it’ (Marc Piasecki/Getty Images)
“He’s beating himself up over this,” he said of Damon to the BBC in 2022, as per Variety.
“And I really think you know, ‘Matt you’re kind of like one of the biggest movie stars in the world, get over it.’ But he had to do another Bourne film which was on his runway and there was nothing we could do about that. So he had to regretfully decline.”
Cameron went on to say that Damon should do a cameo in 2022’s Avatar: The Way of The Water, but it never happened.
There could be hope for next year’s Fire and Ash movie, though!