Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland got concerned on “The Odyssey” set when they heard their leading man, Matt Damon, screaming over and over again in his trailer. Was Damon in pain? Or having a blowout fight over the phone? Pattinson had questions and later discovered that Damon was simply blowing his voice out so he could sound older as the battle-weary Odysseus in Christopher Nolan‘s epic.
“Matt was in the trailer next to me and he was making these noises,” Pattinson said during an MTV U.K. video interview. “He is such a nice guy … I thought he was on the phone and I thought he was a complete psycho. He was just screaming and screaming and screaming. I thought he was having a really bad toilet experience. He was just blowing his voice out just to sound older. Like, really, you’re taking years off your life by doing this.”
Holland also heard Damon’s screams and called his prep work “amazing.”
Oscar nominee Damon is completely transformed in “The Odyssey.” He revealed on the “New Heights” podcast earlier this year that he cut his weight down to 167 pounds for the movie.
“I lost a lot of weight. [Nolan] wanted me lean but strong,” Damon said. “Just because of this other thing that I did with my doctor, I stopped eating gluten. I used to walk around at between 185 and 200, and I did that whole movie at 167. And I haven’t been that light since high school. So it was a lot of training and a really strict diet.”
It’s a far cry from when Damon had to pack on the pounds for his characters. The Oscar nominee gained 30 pounds for 2009’s “The Informant” by “eating like crazy and drinking dark beer,” he told EW at the time. “Between meals on set, I’d eat a No. 1 Value Meal at McDonald’s and then Doritos on top of it. It was absolute heaven.”
“The Odyssey” opens in theaters July 17 from Universal Pictures.
