Matt Damon Is OK With 'Some New Young Jason Bourne' Replacing Him
There's always a new James Bond. We have a new young Han Solo coming. Will we also get a new Jason Bourne someday? Matt Damon was recently in South Korea to promote the new "Jason Bourne" movie, coming out July 29 in the U.S., and he seems resigned to the idea of passing the baton to a younger actor.
As The Hollywood Reporter noted, Damon said he was "definitely going to be replaced some day by some new young Jason Bourne. That happens to everybody and they reboot these things, and that's totally fine. [...] The only control I can exercise is over the ones that I'm part of. I'm the curator of them as long as I'm involved and that's why I battled so hard to make sure that we got the same creative people [including director Paul Greengrass] to get involved in this one."
Greengrass and Damon were not involved in "The Bourne Legacy," which starred Jeremy Renner as Aaron Cross and is the only Bourne movie not to feature Matt Damon's Bourne at all.
This is a good time to be an older action star -- look at Tom Cruise in his 50s, Daniel Craig in his late 40s, heck even Harrison Ford in his 70s -- but it does take a toll on the body. Damon debuted as Bourne back in 2002, and he can't ignore that 14 years have gone by. "It's difficult when you're 45 compared to when you're 29, but you still have to run as fast as you can."
Jason Bourne has become a 21st Century action icon, but will we ever really need a new one? It's possible 20, 30 years from now someone will do a modern version, in whatever format is popular at the time, starring whoever is the next big thing in the future. After all, these films are based on Robert Ludlum's novels, they're not original scripts written for Matt Damon. But Matt Damon will always be the original Bourne.
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