Matt Damon Only Has About 25 Lines in ‘Jason Bourne’
Jason Bourne has never been a verbose character, but in his long-awaited return to the big-screen he really puts the silent in “strong, silent type.”
In an interview with The Guardian, star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass discussed coming back to Bourne after a long layoff. (The last proper Bourne, The Bourne Ultimatum, came out in 2007; in the interim, Jeremy Renner played a Bourne knockoff in The Bourne Legacy.) And in talking about their approach to the character and bringing him into 2016, they mentioned that Damon says almost nothing in the movie. Like, literally no dialogue. Damon said that Greengrass called him after editing Jason Bourne when he realized Damon had “about 25 lines in the whole thing.”
Some movie stars would probably be disappointed with that. Damon told The Guardian it’s sort of par for the course when it comes to playing Bourne:
Well, I’ve done it three times. In the first movie, the Marie Kreutz character [Bourne’s girlfriend, played by Franka Potente) is still alive, so Bourne has a sounding board and he’s more confused about who he is and a lot more chatty. Once she dies in the first act of the second movie, it’s really a very lonely character. And we talked about that mostly on the second one. I remember Tony writing me an email saying, ‘You do realise what this means? You do realise you’re not going to talk in this movie.’ I said, ‘No, I love that.’
Okay, so 25 lines. In the various teasers and trailers for Jason Bourne, Damon has six lines:
- “I know who I am.”
- “I remember. I remember everything.”
- “Tell me.”
- “They tracked you. We gotta move.”
- “I volunteered because of a lie.”
- “This is Jason Bourne. I need to talk.”
Which means he’s got maybe less 20 other lines in the rest of the movie, and that if you’ve watched the Jason Bourne teaser and the trailer, you’ve already seen a full fifth of his dialogue. And also that 20% of his dialogue in the entire movie consists of just 32 words. 32! That just leaves me speechless. Jason Bourne opens in theaters on July 29.