Meeting Matt Damon for the first time in 1997, at a swanky 65th-floor restaurant in New York named Rainbow Room, the then-27-year-old unknown actor was like a puppy dog. He was eager and excited to hear about the great reaction to the first screening of Good Will Hunting, the drama he had written and starred in with childhood best friend Ben Affleck.
I told him to be prepared for his life to change. Sixteen years later, he remembers that conversation as we reminisce about how that change unfolded.
''I think that our version of the fairytale kind of ended with Good Will Hunting, when we won our [best screenplay] Oscar and we thought that was it, that's the end of act three, and we didn't even think beyond that,'' Damon recalls as he relaxes on a couch in a hotel in Cancun, Mexico, for a promotion of his new drama, Elysium.
The soft-spoken actor, wearing black accountant-style glasses and a crumpled grey shirt and jeans, proudly recounts how, after Affleck's 2013 Directors Guild award for his Oscar-winning drama Argo, ''he emailed me and said, 'We didn't even dream about this one!' So our lives have now officially surpassed anything we could've hoped for.''
It's not hard to be won over by Damon, who deserves his reputation as one of the most down-to-earth actors in Hollywood. He's also a happily married husband who recently renewed his vows with former bartender Luciana Barroso (10 years to the day after they met) and a father of four: Alexia, 13 (Luciana's daughter from a previous marriage), Isabella, 7, Gia, 5, and Stella, 2. Damon admits to a hangover after last night's beach party, where he teamed up with fellow guests Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum to film a spoof music video to later air on Jimmy Kimmel's US talk show.
Kimmel and Damon have a long history of feigned animosity (the music video I'm F---ing Matt Damon, shot by Kimmel's ex-fiancee, comedian Sarah Silverman, went viral online) and the actor makes no apologies for his self-deprecating humour.
''I had this theory a long time ago that you can't micromanage an image,'' he says. ''In this day and age it's just impossible, so why not make fun of yourself and not take that part of it too seriously?''
The 42-year-old actor admits his shared love of practical jokes with friends such as Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Affleck also allows him to hang on to some normalcy in his life. ''I think in a way it's undone any mystique, which has made me less interesting to the paparazzi,'' he says. ''So I'm afforded an even more normal life in a way because there's no story, there's nothing that interesting to put in a magazine, and I'm just a married guy with kids.
''My friends Brad and Angelina can't walk down the street anywhere without it becoming an international incident, so I'm aware I just got lucky that I got the best of both worlds, because I can do the work I really want to do and walk down the street without being surrounded by a paramilitary force.''
Elysium, the follow-up film from District 9's South African director and Oscar-nominated writer Neill Blomkamp, is set in the year 2154, when two classes of people exist: the very wealthy, who live on a pristine space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated planet full of crime and poverty.
The only man who can bring equality to these worlds is Max (Damon), who discovers after a work accident that he has only days to live so is willing to take on a dangerous mission to get to Elysium for a cure, pitting him against Elysium's Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster). The film also stars District 9's South African star Sharlto Copley, as well as Alice Braga and Diego Luna.
The metaphor of being ''up there'' and ''down here'' is not lost on Damon. ''I think I'm lucky I married the right woman and I think I was old enough when I got famous that I never believed any of that part of it,'' he says. ''I also have a lot of friends who are not afraid to tell me to go f--- myself, so that helps, too.''
Under the ''down there'' category, Damon grimaces as he talks about filming a big action scene in the second-largest dump in the world, just outside Mexico City.
''It was explained to us that, like any dump anywhere in the world, the dust is actually comprised largely of fecal matter, so it was a lousy couple of weeks where even the crew wore masks, but we were stuck in it,'' he says.
''I'd never seen a giant action set-piece in a Third-World dump, so it was a visual expression of the themes of the movie that really makes an impact.''
Despite his all-American persona, the Boston native has always thrived in roles that ran counter to his squeaky-clean image. In 1991, he ditched Harvard University 12 credits shy of his bachelor's degree in English to pursue his acting career and got off to a good start with School Ties (1992), Geronimo: An American Legend (1993) and Courage under Fire (1996), then continuing after his Oscar win with Saving Private Ryan, The Talented Mr Ripley, Ocean's Eleven and his own action franchise, the Bourne series.
Damon saves his biggest laugh for the suggestion that his children are somehow impressed by his star status. ''My father joked with me recently that in [the '50s American sitcom] The Honeymooners, Jackie Gleason drove a bus and the world was kind of tough on him, but when he got home he was the king of his castle,'' he says. ''He said, 'You're the exact opposite: you go out and everybody treats you great and then you get home and your kids call you 'Baldy' and 'Fatty'.''
Seven of Damon's finest
Will Hunting
(Good Will Hunting, 1997) Will is a janitor at MIT who has a gift for mathematics but needs help from a psychologist (Robin Williams) to find direction.
Private James Ryan
(Saving Private Ryan, 1998) Private Ryan is the last surviving brother of four soldiers in WWII. A group of US troops led by a former schoolteacher (Tom Hanks) go behind enemy lines to bring him home.
Jason Bourne
(The Bourne Identity, 2002) Bourne is fished from the ocean with bullet holes and amnesia but is trying to discover his true identity amid a conspiracy involving the CIA that puts him on the run.
Scott Thorson
(Behind the Candelabra, 2013) Based on Thorson's own memoir about his tempestuous six-year relationship with much older pianist Liberace (Michael Douglas).
Mark Whitacre
(The Informant!, 2009) A former corporate vice-president becomes the star witness and informant in a government case involving price-fixing in the agriculture business.
Colin Sullivan
(The Departed, 2006) In this Martin Scorsese film, Sullivan is a special investigations cop secretly working for an Irish mob boss. When he's asked to find the mole in his own team, he discovers his mob boss is also an FBI informant.
Francois Pienaar
(Invictus, 2009) Damon plays the captain of the national South African rugby team enlisted by Nelson Mandela to unite the apartheid-torn land and win the 1995 Rugby World Cup.
A dystopian top five
Minority Report (2002)
Tom Cruise stars in the Steven Spielberg film set in a future where a special police unit is able to arrest murderers before they commit their crimes. Cruise plays a member of the unit who suddenly becomes identified as a future murderer and has to prove he was set up.
The Matrix (1999)
A computer hacker learns about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers. The film starred Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving and became a trilogy of classic films.
Blade Runner (1982)
Ridley Scott's classic set in LA in 2019, when genetically engineered robots called replicants are banned on Earth and retired police operatives called Blade Runners must hunt them down. Stars Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.
Logan's Run (1976)
The film is set in 2274, when people on Earth live in a domed city but must all be exterminated when they turn 30. Logan 5 (Michael York) is an elite policeman whose job is to terminate runners - until he becomes one himself.
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece is set in the near future in Britain, where a jailed delinquent (Malcolm McDowell) guilty of murder volunteers for an experimental psychological aversion therapy that returns him to society as a different person.
Jenny Cooney Carrillo flew to Cancun courtesy of Sony Pictures. Elysium is out on August 15.
