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Filming Christopher Nolan’s epic took a toll on its leading man.
Key Points
- The requirement that he wear period-appropriate sandals in The Odyssey caused star Matt Damon back pain.
- The 55-year-old actor said running in the footwear during action scenes was particularly brutal.
- The star-studded movie topped the box office in its debut weekend.
Matt Damon hopes you enjoy The Odyssey, because it was often painful for him to make.
While audiences might not have always caught it, director Christopher Nolan’s star-studded retelling of Homer’s ancient poem featured a lot of action scenes in which Damon and his costars were still, as in the rest of the movie, wearing sandals.
“Well, a lot of us were middle-aged people,” Damon, 55, recently told Andy Cohen on SiriusXM’s Radio Andy when he was asked about it, “and what we got was back pain. Because running through Troy, you know, it’s all stone. You’re in these sandals, and they’re very real.”
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And soreness in their lower limbs wasn’t the only effect.
“Our feet were all scuffed up. But more than the little scratches and cuts on your feet, it was the back pain for us,” Damon said. “It was a heavy Advil movie in those weeks where we were doing that action stuff.”
Damon leads a cast featuring Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Samantha Morton, Mia Goth, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Elliot Page, John Leguizamo, and more.
Nolan, who also helmed blockbusters such as Oppenheimer and The Dark Knight, was evidently very strict about the footwear worn on his set.
While sandals from the wardrobe department were sometimes required, Uggs were banned altogether.
“Sometimes actors will turn up, because the footwear hurts them, so they’ll turn up in these big fluffy comfy slippers,” he told Gayle King this week on CBS Mornings. “And the funny thing is, you can be on a set, where you’ve got a guy holding a microphone, you’ve got a giant camera, you’ve got crew everywhere. But something like that can actually weirdly take you out of reality. And for me, I think that’s always been something, where, it’s like if someone’s eating a bag of chips off-camera or something.”
Nolan continued, “There are just certain things that remind you you’re in the real world as opposed to the world we’re trying to create for the actors. I want to stay in the moment, we want the actors to stay in the moment. And so for me, Ugg boots are a signifier of modernity.”
At least the discomfort of the Odyssey’s cast members was worth it. It pulled in $264 million at the box office worldwide. Domestically, the movie’s haul was $124.5 million, according to Rentrak. The figure broke Nolan’s record for an opening at the global box office: $249 million for his 2012 flick The Dark Knight Rises.
The Odyssey is in theaters now.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
