Matt Damon found it difficult to watch Netflix’s ‘Ripley’
Thanks to the industry’s ongoing obsession with remakes, reboots, and reinventions, there’s a high chance any well-known actor with a career spanning decades is going to see at least one role they’ve previously played become inhabited by another performer, which left Matt Damon conflicted.
Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr Ripley released at a pivotal time in Damon’s career, with the freshly-minted Academy Award winner hot off the back of Good Will Hunting, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rainmaker, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, and Kevin Smith’s Dogma.
Playing the title character of Tom Ripley, Damon gave an unsettlingly assured performance in an accomplished psychological thriller that recouped its budget more than three times over at the box office and landed five Oscar nominations including ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, with the leading man earning a Golden Globe nod for ‘Best Actor – Drama’.
A quarter of a century later and the story was brought to the screen once again, this time as a Netflix miniseries starring Andrew Scott as Ripley. The eight-episode show is currently in the running for 13 Primetime Emmys that features nominations for ‘Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series’ and ‘Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie’.
It was a worthy successor to Damon’s trip to the dark side, then, but a combination of personal and professional feelings have left the A-lister unsure of how to feel. “I don’t know,” he told IndieWire when gauged on his interest of a potential Ripley reprisal of his own. “I associate the one that we did so much with Anthony Minghella, who’s passed away now, that I don’t know.”
His association with both the material and the filmmaker who brought it to the screen came at an important time in his professional life, and as a result, Damon struggled with Ripley. “I even had trouble watching the new one, as beautiful as it was and as great as everybody was,” he admitted.
For Damon, “it was hard at first for me to sink back into it just because I have so many great memories,” and watching Ripley wasn’t ideal viewing because his own perspective on the narrative are “all wrapped up in these personal feelings about the experience.”
He doesn’t seem to have any issues with John Malkovich embodying Ripley just four years after his own turn in 2002’s Ripley’s Game, though, even if he’s got some distance from that movie considering it was based on a different book.