Matt Damon is opening up on the big diet change he made for his latest film, The Odyssey. During an appearance on the New Heights podcast on Wednesday, the 55-year-old detailed his physical transformation and how cutting out gluten helped him get down to his high school weight.
How did Matt Damon lose so much weight for The Odyssey?
“I was in really good shape. I lost a lot of weight. He said he wanted me like lean but strong. It's a weird thing,” Damon said of Christopher Nolan. The Martian star told hosts Jason and Travis Kelce that he “used to walk around between 185 [lbs] and 200 [lbs].”
However, by making strict dietary changes, he was able to do “that whole movie at 167 [lbs].” “I literally, just because of this other thing I did with my doctor, stopped eating gluten,” he went on, admitting that it was the lightest he has weighed in years.
“I haven't been that light since high school. So it was a lot of training and a really strict diet,” Damon continued. He likened his fitness routine for the film to that of the Kelce brothers' NFL training.
“You know, it's like just part of your day. It's part of your job, right? And it's like yeah, you get really routinised about it and really kind of build your day around all that stuff,” he explained.
{{/usCountry}}“You know, it's like just part of your day. It's part of your job, right? And it's like yeah, you get really routinised about it and really kind of build your day around all that stuff,” he explained.
{{/usCountry}}Damon has been gluten-free since. “I'm done. I'm done. I'm gluten-free everything,” he told the hosts. This is not the first time that the Good Will Hunting star has followed extreme diets or intense physical training for a movie role.
In a 2016 interview with BBC, Damon revealed that the transformation for his return to the Borne franchise was “brutal.” “For the first Bourne movie I was 29 and I thought that was hard work getting into shape,” he said at the time, adding, “Now I'm 45 and it's just brutal. We shot this bare-knuckle fighting scene on my 45th birthday and it was a lot of work to get there.”