1) He’s so goddamn good in everything he’s in
Even among good actors there are different levels of appreciation for their work. For someone like Daniel Day-Lewis, it’s as if he’s not even a person but a shape-shifter who slips into the skin of an actual other dude for every movie he’s in. And he also just seems like a lovely and gracious chap. I can’t relate to someone so perfect.
Then there’s someone like De Niro who does his thing on screen and then is just sort of a quiet guy otherwise, someone you can totally relate to (particularly us introverts) but don’t feel like you know at all, or can’t get a sense of, making it hard to appreciate performances at times. Or there’s someone like Anne Hathaway or Hugh Jackman, who are tremendously good but a lot of times the effort they put in is visible and the magic of a performance gets lost in the sight of every string holding them up.
With Matt Damon, he’s just casually real, and cool, and intense when he needs to be, and earnest, and true. The understatedness of his stardom is matched by the understatedness and subtlety of his work. He has a surprising range of skills that allow him to be Jason Bourne one minute and Mark Whitacre the next. Seeing Hugh Jackman go from Wolverine to Jean Valjean is surprising, and we begrudgingly admit that he’s crazy good in both. With Damon though, the reaction seems more like, “of course he can do these things.”