Hollywood star Matt Damon on his gripping new film Stillwater

Virgin Radio

3 Aug 2021, 15:15

By Virgin Radio - @VirginRadioUK

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

The Hollywood heavyweight joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to talk about his latest offering Stillwater which hits cinemas this Friday 6th August and how much he's missed the movies. 

He told Chris: “I got emotional at the end of the screening. I hadn't been to a movie in a year-and-a-half and to be in a room with that many people it definitely had a new meaning. I was reminded of how much we need to all sit in a dark room and watch movies together and how good that is for the soul.”

Receiving a five-minute standing ovation, he admitted: “I’ve always been quite embarrassed when everyone in the room’s looking at you but I was very moved just to be in a room with 1,000 other people and feel like hopefully this

is the first sign that we are done with this tough year-and-a-half for everybody.”

On it having a very French feel, he said: “90% of the film or more was shot in Marseille. It’s very much a character in the movie. Two of our female leads are French [Camille Cottin and Lilou Siauvaud] and then we've got tonnes of other French actors filling out the cast so there are far more French people in the movie than Americans.”

The award-winning actor plays Bill Baker, an American oil rig roughneck who has an estranged daughter banged up in Marseille in a jail.

He explained: “She has been put in prison for a crime that she's innocent of and she's been there for five years already. I go periodically to visit her. 

“This roughneck from Oklahoma - which is a very specific place and a very specific thing to be in that place, it’s not somebody who would get normally get out of that area of America - and we follow him to Marseille to find out that he's visiting his daughter. 

“He’s got this damaged relationship with his daughter. He was an absentee father, had some problems with drugs and alcohol and wasn't around for her and feels some level of responsibility for her life and where she is and he's trying to repair the relationship. 

“What he ends up trying to do is exonerate her. He's the opposite of a Jason Bourne or Liam Neeson character. He has no set of skills at all to help but he has this overriding impulse to do just that and the movie follows him trying to help her.

“He ends up staying in Marseille and becoming roommates with this single mum and her daughter, and slowly building this relationship. He ends up being the surrogate father to this child and has the relationship with this little girl that he never had with his own daughter. 

“He’s somebody you can feel he has a tendency to mess things up and in the course of trying to help his daughter it has an impact on this relationship that he has with the little girl and with her mum who he's slowly falling in love with.

“The guy really goes on a long journey in this movie. It’s a beautiful movie and I'm very proud of it. I hope people go check it out.”

Stillwater hits cinemas this Friday 6th August.

For more great interviews listen to The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky, weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or catch up on-demand here.