Background and career
Matthew Paige Damon ( DAY-mən; born October 8, 1970) is an American actor, film producer, and screenwriter. He was ranked among Forbes's most bankable stars in 2007, and in 2010 was one of the highest-grossing actors of all time. He has received various awards and nominations, including an Academy Award, an Actor Award, and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for three British Academy Film Awards and seven Primetime Emmy Awards.
Damon made his acting debut in the film Mystic Pizza (1988) before gaining prominence in 1997 when he and Ben Affleck wrote and starred in Good Will Hunting, which won them the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. He further established himself as a leading man by starring as Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Jason Bourne in the Bourne franchise (2002–2007; 2016), and Linus Caldwell in the Ocean's trilogy (2001–2007). He received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing a rugby player in Invictus (2009) and received another nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for playing an astronaut stranded on Mars in The Martian (2015). He also acted in The Rainmaker (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Syriana (2005), The Departed (2006), The Informant! (2009), True Grit (2010), Contagion (2011), Interstellar (2014), Ford v Ferrari (2019), The Last Duel (2021), Air (2023), Oppenheimer (2023), and played the titular character in The Odyssey (2026).
On television, Damon portrayed Scott Thorson in the HBO biopic Behind the Candelabra (2013), for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. He was Emmy-nominated for his guest role in 30 Rock in 2011 and for hosting Saturday Night Live in 2019. He also produced the reality series Project Greenlight (2001–2015) as well as the film Manchester by the Sea (2016). Damon has performed voiceover work in both animated and documentary films and established two production companies with Affleck, Artists Equity and the former Pearl Street Films. He has been involved in charitable work with organizations including the One Campaign, H2O Africa Foundation, Feeding America, and Water.org.
Matthew Paige Damon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 8, 1970, the second son of Kent Telfer Damon, a stockbroker, and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an early childhood education professor at Lesley University. His father has English and Scottish ancestry, while his mother is of Finnish and Swedish descent; her family surname had been changed from Pajari to Paige. Damon and his family moved to Newton for two years, where he lived in a two-bedroom duplex next to the historian and author Howard Zinn. His parents divorced when he was two years old, and he and his brother returned with their mother to Cambridge, where they lived in a six-family communal house. His brother, Kyle, is a sculptor and artist. Damon has said that, as a teenager, he felt lonely, as if he did not belong, and that his mother's by-the-book approach to child-rearing had made it hard for him to define his own identity.
How Matt Damon makes money
He and Affleck were each paid salaries of $600,000, while the film grossed over $225 million at the worldwide box office. In 2000, Damon, Affleck, and producers Chris Moore and Sean Bailey founded the production company LivePlanet to create the Emmy-nominated documentary series Project Greenlight, which aimed to find and fund worthwhile film projects by novice filmmakers.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (2026-07-08), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
