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How the ''Bourne'' movies revived Matt Damon's career | jul232004_775_lg

Despite having spent the last year filming ''The Brothers Grimm'' with director Terry Gilliam in Prague, then ''Supremacy'' in Berlin, Damon has managed to stay in the American public eye, thanks to manic tabloid coverage of the filming of his other film, the Steven Soderbergh sequel ''Ocean's Twelve,'' in Rome (check out Damon kissing his girlfriend, Miami bartender Luciana Barroso! Watch costars George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Damon go Jet Skiing!). The recent attention places Damon far from his comfort zone, but it's surely better than the state of things two years ago, when no one really wanted to see Damon in front of the cameras no matter what the activity entailed. Before ''Bourne,'' ''I hadn't had a movie offer in I don't know how long -- months and months and months,'' remembers the actor. ''My agent would call and say, 'Matty, it didn't pan out this time.'''

And that was supposed to be the GOOD time in Damon's career. After spending much of the '90s stuck on the middle rung of young male actors, with roles in such movies as ''Courage Under Fire'' and ''The Rainmaker'' under his belt, Damon finally hit pay dirt: He and his good friend Ben Affleck wrote a small drama about a math prodigy named Will Hunting, which would win them not only a screenwriting Oscar but some long-earned movie-star muscle.

Affleck, who declined to comment for this piece, happily flexed his, jumping into the high-stakes, high-budget action realm with 1998's ''Armageddon.'' Damon, on the other hand, opted for the role of a troubled poker-playing student in 1998's ''Rounders,'' produced by Miramax, which had produced ''Good Will Hunting'' and subsequently signed Affleck and Damon to a multipicture deal. Damon followed ''Rounders'' with Anthony Minghella's dark drama ''The Talented Mr. Ripley,'' in which he played an expat sociopath opposite Jude Law and then-Affleck girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow. The film made $81 million, but received mixed reviews. ''It was an incredible experience,'' says Damon, but ''Anthony was coming off of 'The English Patient,' so no one was particularly rushing to toot his horn, and I was coming off of 'Good Will Hunting,' so it was the same for me.''


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