Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland became worried on the set of Odyssey when they heard their leading man, Matt Damon, screaming over and over again in his trailer. Was Damon hurt? Or got into a fight over the phone? Pattinson had questions and later discovered that Damon was simply raising his voice to appear older, like the battle-weary Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s epic.
“Matt was in the trailer next to me making these noises,” Pattinson said during a video interview with MTV UK. “He’s such a nice guy… I thought he was on the phone and I thought he was completely crazy. He was just screaming and screaming and screaming. I thought he had a really bad experience in the bathroom. He was just screaming to make himself look older. Like, really, you’re taking years off your life doing this.”
Holland also heard Damon’s screams and called his prep work “amazing.”
Oscar nominee Damon gets a complete makeover in The Odyssey. Earlier this year, he revealed on the New Heights podcast that he lost 167 pounds for the film.
“I lost a lot of weight. Nolan wanted me to be lean but strong,” Damon said. “Just because of what I did with my doctor, I stopped eating gluten. I used to walk around weighing between 185 and 200 pounds, and I did this whole movie at 167. And I haven’t been this light since high school. So it was a lot of training and a really strict diet.”
This is a far cry from the time when Damon had to gain weight for his characters. The Oscar nominee gained 30 pounds for 2009’s The Informant by “eating like crazy and drinking dark beer,” he told EW at the time. “Between meals on set, I would eat the No. 1 meal at McDonald’s and then top it with Doritos. It was pure heaven.”
The Odyssey opens in Universal Pictures theaters July 17.