Matt Damon Was a Huge Star Wars Fanboy

Matt Damon Photo by Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com

After starring in The Martian, Elysium, and Interstellar, we should’ve guessed that Matt Damon was a fan of giant space epics.

While his sci-fi films are a bit more realistic, the Cambridge native revealed during a recent chat with Variety that he’s actually a huge fanboy of the Star Wars franchise.

Like many young fans, Damon said that he saw the first installment over a dozen times in theaters when he was a kid growing up in the Boston-area.

“I mean the first one, I think my brother saw it 26 times and I saw it 18 times,” Damon said. “And that was back in the day where you’d go down to the movie theater and we’d see it—sometimes sit twice through it. I was 7 and it was literally just something we did. I just remembered that it was in the theater for months and months and months and if a week would go by and we hadn’t seen it, we’d just go back down and see it again.”

The actor admitted that he was “not as keen” for the prequel trilogy, a notion that should win him some brownie points with the majority of Star Wars fans around the globe who share his disdain for Episodes I-III.

As for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, though, Damon did sound pretty excited to see the franchise’s seventh installment.

“This one, it looks fantastic,” Damon said. “The trailers they’ve cut are amazing and J.J. [Abrams] is so talented that I just think it’s going to be great.”

Check out more of Damon’s interview at Variety.