Downward angle icon Downward angle icon. Josh Hartnett in Oppenheimer. Universal Josh Hartnett gained 30 pounds for his role in Oppenheimer. Co-star Matt Damon warned him it would be hard to lose the weight after filming wrapped. “He said, ‘You’ll never lose weight again,'” Hartnett recalled Damon telling him.
Matt Damon knows a thing or two about the challenges of gaining and losing weight for a role. It’s a shame he didn’t warn co-star Josh Hartnett before deciding to gain 30 pounds to play famed physicist Ernest Lawrence in “Oppenheimer.”
“He said, ‘You’ll never get that again,'” Hartnett recalled Damon saying on “The Tonight Show.”
“He says, ‘You’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to lose weight, but your body is going to keep putting the weight back on, so you’re never going to lose the weight. You’re just going to keep going back to that size.’
Hartnett also understood that Damon’s advice came too late. “He kept telling me that throughout production,” he added. “I was like, ‘Thanks, Matt.'”
Matt Damon gained 30 pounds for 2009’s “The Informant!” Screenshot / The Informant
Damon knows from personal experience the dangers of gaining and losing weight for a role: After he lost 40 pounds to play a soldier suffering from PTSD in 1996’s “Courage Under Fire,” doctors told him the drastic change could permanently shrink his heart.
A few years later, he gained 30 pounds for the 2009 satire “The Informant” and also trained rigorously for the Jason Bourne films, eating 2,000 calories a day and reducing his water intake in order to look the way he did in 2016’s “Jason Bourne.”
But if the now 53-year-old actor follows his own advice — Hartnett recalls him saying, “Don’t get fat after 40” — maybe Damon’s days of on-set transformations are over.
