Matt Damon Nearly Turned Down ‘The Martian’ Over One Fear

Matt Damon once sat down with Ridley Scott to quit a role that would go on to gross $630 million and land him an Oscar nomination. He had just spent months playing an astronaut stranded alone on a distant planet in Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” and doing it again for “The Martian” felt, in his own head, like repeating himself. Scott needed about two seconds to talk him out of it.

Damon told the story this week to Anne Hathaway, his co-star in Nolan’s new film “The Odyssey,” during a joint conversation for Harper’s Bazaar UK’s video series. The same press tour also produced a wider roundtable on Nolan’s IMAX-only shoot, but that single answer about “The Martian” has since been picked up across entertainment outlets on both sides of the Atlantic. A decade on, the numbers make Damon’s fear look almost quaint, and the director who waved it away this easily is finally collecting his own overdue recognition from the Academy this November.

A Meeting Meant to End in No

Damon did not call an agent or fire off a note. He asked to meet Scott in person for the sole purpose of passing on the part of Mark Watney, the botanist left for dead on Mars in “The Martian.” He had his reasoning ready before he even sat down.

“I actually once went to meet Sir Ridley Scott to turn down ‘The Martian’ because I had just done that part in ‘Interstellar,’” Damon said. “And I got so in my head. I said, ‘Well, I just played a guy stranded on a planet. I can’t then go play a guy stranded on a planet.’”

Scott’s response came immediately.

Oh, no one gives a s**t.

That was the entire counterargument, delivered, in Damon’s telling, without missing a beat.

“And I was like, ‘All right, I’ll do it,’” Damon recalled. He later summed up his own thought process bluntly: “This is me just classically, stupidly overthinking things.” Looking back, he calls it one of the great decisions he has made in his life.

Two Astronauts, One Head Full of Doubt

Damon’s anxiety was not paranoia. In “Interstellar,” he played Dr. Mann, an astronaut whose entire arc depends on being found alone on a frozen, hostile planet after his mission has quietly failed. “The Martian” opened about a year later with Damon as Mark Watney, a botanist accidentally left behind on Mars who has to engineer his own survival in real time.

Both films came from directors known for spectacle, and both isolated Damon on screen for long stretches, reasoning out loud to hold an audience’s attention without another actor in the frame. Other outlets covering the same Harper’s Bazaar conversation zeroed in on exactly that overlap: two prestige science fiction roles, released about a year apart, both astronauts, both stranded.

The Role Had Already Survived One Near Miss

Damon’s meeting with Scott was not even the first time “The Martian” nearly happened without him. Producer Simon Kinberg began developing novelist Andy Weir’s book for 20th Century Fox in 2013, and writer-director Drew Goddard, fresh off “Cabin in the Woods,” signed on to adapt and direct it, with Damon already cast as Watney.

“I was going to do it with Drew directing,” Damon said in a 2015 profile timed to the film’s Oscar campaign. “I read and loved his script, watched his other work and I was sold.”

Then Goddard got the chance to make “Sinister Six,” a Spider-Man villain team-up movie for Sony he had wanted to direct for years, and left “The Martian” to take it. Damon assumed the Mars project would sit on a shelf for a year while everyone waited for Goddard to come back.

“So he bowed out and I thought I was going to wait and we’d put it on the back burner for a year,” Damon said. “And then, about a week later, we got word that Ridley wanted to do it.”

Goddard’s film never got made. He has since said the 2014 Sony hack derailed the production before Sony’s plan to fold Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe ended what remained of it a year later. The movie Goddard left to make sat unfinished. The one he walked away from became Scott’s biggest hit.

The Martian, by the Numbers

The hesitation looks almost comical against what the finished film actually did.

That haul made “The Martian” Scott’s highest-grossing film to date, boosted by a $94 million haul in China, a country the story itself treats warmly. The Best Actor nomination was Damon’s third for acting at the Oscars, following Good Will Hunting and Invictus, and it came with a Golden Globe win in what Variety called a curious category for a survival drama: Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy.

Why Has Ridley Scott Never Won a Competitive Oscar?

Ridley Scott has directed 30 films across more than five decades and picked up four Academy Award nominations, three of them for Best Director, without a single competitive win. The Academy addressed the gap in June 2026, announcing an Honorary Award for Scott at that year’s Governors Awards, more than three decades after his first nomination.

Scott’s confidence in that meeting with Damon fits a long pattern. He has spent his whole career watching the Academy nominate his films and pass him over anyway.

1. 1991: “Thelma & Louise” brings Scott his first Best Director nomination. He loses.
2. 2000: “Gladiator” wins Best Picture, but Scott, uncredited as a producer, does not personally win it, and loses Best Director to Steven Soderbergh for “Traffic.”
3. 2001: “Black Hawk Down” earns a third Best Director nomination. Ron Howard wins instead for “A Beautiful Mind.”
4. 2016: “The Martian” collects seven nominations, including Best Picture, but Scott is left off the Best Director list entirely, the last time one of his films reached the Best Picture race.
5. June 10, 2026: The Academy announces Scott will receive an Honorary Award that year.
6. November 15, 2026: Scott collects the statuette at the Governors Awards.

Denzel Washington, who worked with Scott on “Gladiator II,” made the case publicly months before the Academy acted. “Would you tell somebody how can this man not have an Academy Award?” Washington said. “Do your job. I mean, seriously, though.”

Scott will collect his statuette alongside Glenn Close’s eight nominations without a win at the Governors Awards. It is his first Oscar after a 36 year wait.

Hathaway’s Regret Runs the Other Way

Hathaway’s own story, shared later in the same conversation, moved in the opposite direction. She turned down a film without ever meeting its director in person, a decision she does not regret in terms of the part itself, though she wishes she had handled the conversation differently.

“The director of that project is somebody that I have wanted to work with since and I don’t know that I’m gonna get the opportunity because he really wanted me for that part and there’s something about it that didn’t resonate with me,” Hathaway said, without naming the filmmaker or the project.

“In hindsight, I should’ve sat down with him, should’ve looked him eye to eye, explained what was going on for me and given him a chance to plead his case,” she added. “What I know now is that you always meet with the director.”

Damon drew the larger lesson out loud. “People care so much less about you than you think,” he said. “It’s so liberating when you’re just like, ‘Nobody actually cares.’”

“The Odyssey” opened this month carrying its own $375 million theatrical wager, and strong reviews have already put Damon back into awards conversations for the first time in a decade, a conversation that this year’s reshuffled Best Picture field is still sorting out. Scott’s statuette arrives in November regardless, more than a decade after a two-second answer decided how “The Martian” turned out.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Matt Damon and Ridley Scott work together again after “The Martian”?

Yes. They reunited in 2021 for “The Last Duel,” a medieval epic set in fourteenth-century France. Scott released two films that year, since “House of Gucci” also arrived in theaters within months of “The Last Duel.”

Was Anne Hathaway also in “Interstellar” with Matt Damon?

She was. Hathaway and Damon both appeared in Nolan’s 2014 film before reuniting twelve years later as co-stars in Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” the film they were promoting when this story came up.

Has Matt Damon described turning down other major roles?

He has. Damon has also told a story about passing on a role in “Avatar” that he said cost him a significant amount of money in potential earnings, an account James Cameron has publicly disputed.

What happened to the “Sinister Six” movie that Drew Goddard left “The Martian” to direct?

It was never finished. Goddard has said the 2014 Sony hack derailed production before Sony’s deal to move Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe ended the “Amazing Spider-Man” series entirely. Pieces of a villain team-up eventually surfaced years later in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”

How many total Oscar nominations does Matt Damon have?

Five, across four categories: Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay for “Good Will Hunting,” Best Supporting Actor for “Invictus,” Best Actor for “The Martian,” and a Best Picture nomination as a producer on “Manchester by the Sea.”