Matt Damon is getting real about why he passed on starring in Seth MacFarlane’s 2012 comedy Ted.
In a new interview, Damon looked back on his career and explained why, despite loving the script, he ended up moving on.
“I never like to say that, because I don’t want to live with the regret, but I can tell you that I passed on Ted, and I’ve never had this experience where I laughed so hard reading a script,” Damon said in an interview with GQ.
He continued, “I literally took it to dinner and was reading parts of it out to my friends at dinner. And then I just got too clever by half. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was like, Well, maybe the teddy bear’s actually the best part.…”
Mark Wahlberg went on to star in the film as John Bennett, a Boston native whose childhood wish brings his teddy bear Ted to life. The production filmed in Boston, which was one of the factors Damon looked back on and regrets not haven taken the opportunity.
“I overthought it and I talked myself out of it. And because it shot in Boston, it would’ve been a chance for me to be home—my father’s passed away now, and I look back and I go, Man, that would’ve been six months back [home],” Damon explained.
The actor has since watched Ted and said Wahlberg is “great and the movie’s great,” adding, “I wouldn’t have made it better.
Ted wasn’t the only film Damon passed on, citing Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Gus Van Sant’s Milk as other projects he didn’t do because of scheduling conflicts.
“I think I was on a Bourne movie or about to go do Green Zone with Paul Greengrass,” Damon said about being offered the Harvey Dent role in the DC film.
As far as Milk, Damon said, “I was supposed to play the Dan White part. And I was really excited about it. I’d spoken to Sean [Penn], and I’d started the research. I’d been watching the documentaries about him.”
“Then Sean’s schedule changed and the movie had to push three months, which meant that it was going to conflict with the movie I was going to do with Paul. So I had to bow out, and I just loved that script so much,” he continued. “And I love Gus [Van Sant], obviously. And so that was a bummer. But having said that, they got Josh Brolin, and Josh is absolutely brilliant in the movie. That helped a lot, I think, with this feeling that I have, that I do believe that the right actor gets the part.”
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