In an exhaustive interview to Playboy magazine, the big screen's Jason Bourne says when he and his brother were young, her mother -- a professor of early childhood education -- encouraged them to play with toys that shaped their minds... and lives.
Damon gravitated to dolls -- superhero dolls. 'I remember knowing it might not be that cool to tell some of the other guys that I played with them, even if they were superheroes,' he tells Playboy in course of a wide-ranging interview that discusses his movies, his friendship with fellow star (and fellow Oscar-winner for the screenplay of Good Will Hunting) Ben Affleck, his earlier relationship with Winona Ryder, and the current love of his life -- interior decorator Luciana Barroso.
The 34-year-old star is on a high.
Since his screen debut in the 1988 film Mystic Pizza, Damon has had a succession of big films -- Good Will Hunting (which he co-scripted with Affleck), Saving Private Ryan, The Talented Mr Ripley, Ocean's Eleven, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind...
But it was his role as the amnesiac CIA operative Jason Bourne, in the 2002 hit The Bourne Identity, that finally gave him undisputed box office clout.
The film, budgeted at $75 million, had a slow opening -- just $27.8 million in its opening weekend. Word of mouth -- mostly relating to his edgy performance, and some to-die for fight sequences, powered the film to a gross of $121.5 million in the US market alone.
That performance made him a natural for the sequel -- the $75 million Bourne Supremacy -- which opened July 25 and demonstrated Damon's draw with a phenomenal weekend box office of $52.5 million (and a further $24 million in its second week); the Universal Studios flick topped the box office in its first week, and is second behind M Night Shyamalan's The Village this week.
Upcoming movies include The Brothers Grimm, now in post-production, and Steven Soderberg's Ocean's Twelve, for which he is currently filming.
Oh yes, he will also be seen, shortly, in a rather unusual place -- the polling booth. He has never voted in his life, Damon tells Playboy, because he is from Massachusetts, and 'everyone I would have ever voted for didn't need my vote anyway.' (That would be Ted Kennedy, the senior senator from the state, and John Kerry, the junior senator and Democratic presidential nominee).
But this time, he will vote. The turnaround, he says, came about because of a realisation of where the country is going -- and that knowledge that it is not a direction he wants it to go in. 'It's like you want to mobilise everybody to get out and vote because look what's at stake,' Damon says.
This, he tells Playboy, is the most 'politically critical moment of my lifetime.'
'I'm going to register before this next election. I'll vote for John Kerry.'
