Aaron Eckhart’s iconic performance as two-faced in ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008) was met with immense praise from the public. But before the role had been offered to none other than actor Matt Damon. While the role of Harvey Dent might have paled in comparison to Christian Bale’s Batman or Heath Ledger’s Joker, the character contributed significantly to the Christopher Nolan-directed film.
Damon turned down the role at the time not knowing that the film would end up being hailed as one of the best films in the genre. In an episode of Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, the ‘Air’ star revealed how he turned down the role in the billion-grossing superhero movie dollars because I already had a big project lined up during that time.
“Well, ‘Dark Knight’ was a small role that I was offered (laughs)… It wasn’t the role of Heath or Christian… There was another big movie, a major role that I was doing where I was like, ‘Well, no. I can play Harvey Dent, this is a relatively small role, but I’m headlining this other thing.’
However, the actor does not keep bile for his decision-making, especially after having rejected the 10% of the collection of ‘Avatar’, the highest grossing film in history.
“But you have to be optimistic about it and say, ‘Everything works.'” At this point, he had accidentally passed the highest salary in movie history, so he could never do worse financially, could never make a worse financial mistake.”
Subsequently would get the thorn out of working with Nolan in his appearance surprise in ‘Interstellar’. This is how he tells it:
“Sometimes you look at a role, it’s good, it’s a good role in a great movie. Later I did a small part in one of Christopher Nolan’s movies in ‘Interstellar.’ I wanted to be a part of that company, he works with the same actors over and over again, but I wanted to be on that journey.”
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