Matt Damon’s noisy Odyssey prep had Robert Pattinson worried
Robert Pattinson said Matt Damon yelled in his trailer on The Odyssey set to roughen his voice for Christopher Nolan’s film.
By Poppy Nakagawa · Culture Writer
2 min read
Matt Damon’s Odysseus prep apparently came with a soundtrack loud enough to rattle the neighbors.
Robert Pattinson said in an MTV U.K. video interview that he and Tom Holland became worried while working on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey after hearing Damon repeatedly yelling from a nearby trailer. Pattinson said the noise left him wondering whether Damon was in distress or caught in some kind of private blowup.
According to Pattinson, the explanation was actorly rather than alarming: Damon was trying to rough up his voice so he could sound older while playing the worn-down Greek hero Odysseus.
“Matt was in the trailer next to me and he was making these noises,” Pattinson said in the interview. He called Damon “such a nice guy,” then said he initially thought the actor “was on the phone” and “a complete psycho.”
Pattinson added that Damon “was just screaming and screaming and screaming,” and joked that he wondered if the noise was tied to “a really bad toilet experience.” He said he later learned Damon was “blowing his voice out just to sound older,” adding, “you’re taking years off your life by doing this.”
Holland also heard the racket, according to Variety, and described Damon’s preparation as “amazing.”
Damon went lean for Nolan’s epic
The vocal wear-and-tear was only one piece of Damon’s transformation for the Universal Pictures film. Damon said earlier this year on the New Heights podcast that he brought his weight down to 167 pounds for the role.
“I lost a lot of weight,” Damon said on the podcast, explaining that Nolan wanted him “lean but strong.” Damon said he stopped eating gluten after doing “this other thing” with his doctor, and that he had previously tended to weigh between 185 and 200 pounds.
Damon said he stayed at 167 pounds through the shoot and had not been that light since high school. He credited the change to “a lot of training” and “a really strict diet.”
The slimmed-down look marks a sharp swing from one of Damon’s earlier body changes for a role. For 2009’s The Informant!, Damon told Entertainment Weekly at the time that he gained 30 pounds by “eating like crazy and drinking dark beer.”
He told EW that between meals on set, he would eat a No. 1 Value Meal from McDonald’s and then add Doritos. Damon described that period as “absolute heaven.”
The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Damon, Pattinson and Holland, is set to open in theaters July 17 through Universal Pictures.
This story draws on original reporting from Variety.