Theoretically being featured in a comedy as iconic as ‘Team America‘ would be a bit of a treat, unless of course you’re in there as a dude who can only say his own name and is (possibly extremely offensively) depicted as maybe having some sort of mental disability.
Such is the case with Matt Damon AKA Jason Bourne AKA the genius janitor from ‘Good Will Hunting‘, who copped a pretty brutal treatment in the filthiest puppet-based movie known to man.
He was not shy about discussing his feelings about it in an AMA he just did on Reddit:
“I was always kind of bewildered by Team America, I think because it’s hard for us to understand what our images are in public, I think we’re not good judges of that, and when I saw myself on screen just only able to say my own name and not really that well, I kind of wondered “Wow, is that how people perceive me?”“At that point I just kind of was like, I’m a screenwriter and an actor, and like really? I can barely say my own name? So I was always bewildered by that, and I never talked to Trey and Matt about that.”
Seems like he’s not mad though, just disappointed:
“Incidentally, I believe those two are geniuses, and I don’t use that word lightly. I think they are absolute geniuses, and what they’ve done is awesome and I’m a big fan of theirs, but I never quite understood that one.“But I will say this. Those of us who were parodied in that video were parodied because we were against the Iraq War, and we went on the record against that war, and so history is on my side not theirs.”
My gut feeling is that he probably wasn’t being picked on just because he, like a bunch of other people, opposed a wildly unpopular war, but considering the seemingly random way Trey Parker and Matt Stone seem to choose their targets, who knows.
According to IMDB, the idiot version of Matt Damon was not what they’d planned originally:
“Originally, Matt Damon (who Trey Parker and Matt Stone have admitted is really a “pretty cool guy”) was going to be portrayed as intelligent and articulate, but when they saw the puppet, they noted that it made him “look retarded” and decided to portray him as such.”
More deeply intelligent satire from a razor-sharp writing duo.
Damon also responded to some incredible investigative work Quora user Kynan Eng, who crunched the numbers and worked out that very close to $1 Trillion had been (fictionally) spent on saving him over the course of his filmography:
“Yeah, so that article was sent to me. I might be the first person for whom a trillion movie dollars was spent to rescue, so obviously that will be a milestone, and I am actively looking for projects that could cost people money trying to come get me. Thank you.”
Asked how he would celebrate it:
“I think a big Reddit party would be the way to go.”
I’m not entirely sure what a Reddit party is, but that sounds like the worst thing ever.
Source: Reddit.
Photo: Getty Images / Bertrand Rindoff Petroff.
