Matt Damon knows exactly what he's doing when it comes to two things: movies, and his relationship with his wife Luciana Barroso.
The actor stars in Christopher Nolan's highly-anticipated historical drama Oppenheimer – out in theaters July 21st – and as it turns out, it was a conversation he had in couples therapy that secured him the role of Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves.
Before he was cast in Oppenheimer, he had already been busy in the last two years with movies such as Air, which he starred and produced with BFF Ben Affleck, The Last Duel, which he starred, produced and co-wrote, Thor: Love and Thunder, and No Sudden Move.
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Sitting down for Entertainment Weekly's Around the Table series, Matt revealed that as a result, his wife had asked him to take a break from acting.
However, it was a small caveat he added in their agreement that ensured he would be allowed to work on Oppenheimer, specifically with director Christopher Nolan, who he previously worked with on 2014's Interstellar.
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"This is going to sound made up, but it's actually true," he first told co-stars Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, and Robert Downey Jr., adding: "I had – not to get too personal – negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off. I had been in Interstellar, and then Chris put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn't in the rotation."
He then revealed: "But I actually negotiated in couples therapy – this is a true story – the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called," which couldn't have come more in handy!
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Matt further explained: "This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you. He just calls you out of the blue," concluding: "And so, it was a moment in my household."
"So, even modern psychology has a caveat..." Robert joked back, to which Matt maintained: "For Chris!"
The three-hour film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, authored by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin over a period of twenty-five years, which was released in 2005.
Both tell the story of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, who is considered "the father of the atomic bomb," and is best known for his role in the Manhattan Project, a US government-led research project supported by the UK and Canada which ran from 1942 to 1945 that produced the world's first atomic bombs.
Matt's character worked directly alongside Cillian's, Oppenheimer himself, on the infamous Manhattan Project. Emily stars as Oppenheimer's wife, Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer Vissering, Robert as former United States Secretary of Commerce Lewis Strauss, and Florence Pugh plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer's young mistress.