“Avatar” director James Cameron was asked about Matt Damon’s snub regarding his decision to turn down the leading role in the original blockbuster film and said Damon shouldn’t feel blue.
In a recent interview with BBC Radio, Cameron was asked about Damon’s decision to pass on playing Jake Sully while discussing the much-anticipated sequel, “Avatar: The Way of Water.”
“He’s beating himself up over this,” Cameron said with a laugh. “And I really think, you know, ‘Matt, you’re kind of like one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Get over it.’ But he had to do another ‘Bourne’ film which was on his runway, and there was nothing we could do about that. So he had to regretfully decline.”
A clip of Matt Damon went viral last year after he revealed at the Cannes Film Festival that Cameron asked him in 2009 to star in the film and offered him 10% of the film’s box office profits.
As we know, Damon turned down the role, and it eventually went to Sam Worthington. “Avatar” became the highest-grossing movie of all time, bringing in $2 billion worldwide, which would have put more than $250 million in Damon’s pocket.
At that time, Damon told Entertainment Weekly, “I will go down in history. You will never meet an actor who turned down more money.”
Damon said at the festival that he turned down “Avatar” because he had already committed to completing the “Bourne” film trilogy with director Paul Greengrass. Damon, who plays the main character- Jason Bourne, said that choosing to return and finish the Bourne sequel(s) was the right “moral decision.”
When asked if Damon could get a cameo in a future “Avatar” movie, Cameron said, “Must do it. We have to do it, so the world is in equilibrium again. But he doesn’t get 10%, f–k that.”
The sequel- “Avatar: The Way of Water” netted about $435 million worldwide in its opening weekend