Matt Damon has revealed that his preparation for his breakthrough role in The Rainmaker involved spending a month working as a real bartender in Tennessee, for free.
Speaking to GQ in a video interview alongside his The Odyssey co-stars Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland, the 54-year-old recalled the lengths he went to ahead of filming the 1997 Francis Ford Coppola adaptation.
“I bartended down in Knoxville, Tennessee to pick up an accent,” he said. “And I did that for, like a month.”
The logic was straightforward.
Damon’s character Rudy Baylor, a newly qualified law student in Memphis who eventually takes on a corrupt insurance company, was also a bartender, and Damon had a gap in his schedule before rehearsals began.
Coppola had organised three weeks of rehearsals at his home in Napa Valley, leaving Damon with time to fill.
“I had a month to kill,” he said. Rather than sit idle, he approached a bar manager in Knoxville and offered his services at no cost.
“I’ll give all my tips to these guys, and I just need to be here,” he told her. “But if you’re serving drinks to people, they talk to you.”
He described the film as “a big break”, hardly surprising given it was a Francis Ford Coppola picture, and the effort he put into the preparation reflects just how seriously he took the opportunity.
Damon is currently promoting The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation that filmed across 91 days in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland and on Universal Studios’ lot in the United States.
He described the shoot as relentlessly demanding on the crew, with every new location proving harder than the last.
“The joke on the crew was we didn’t have a single easy location,” he told GQ.
“Every time we’d go somewhere, we’d be like, ‘Well, Iceland will be easier.’ And then it’s raining sideways and it’s f—ing freezing. Iceland was like, ‘Yeah, easy? Hey, hold my beer.'”
The Odyssey opens in cinemas on 17 July.
