Matt Damon negotiated with his wife during a couples therapy session that he was taking a break from working unless Christopher Nolan called. Nolan would then call Damon about being part of the Oppenheimer cast.
“This is going to sound made up, but it’s actually true,” Damon said during an appearance on EW’s Around the Table. “I had — not to get too personal — negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off.”
Damon recalled he had been in Nolan’s Interstellar and said the director “put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation.”
“I actually negotiated in couples therapy — this is a true story — the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called,” Damon continued. “This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything because he never tells you. He just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household.”
In Oppenheimer, Damon plays Leslie Groves, the general that oversaw the Manhattan Project. The cast of Oppenheimer also includes Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek and Kenneth Branagh, among others. Oppenheimer drops in theaters on July 21.