Academy Award-winner Matt Damon portrays real-life rugby player Francois Pienaar who joined forces with South African President Nelson Mandela to help unite their country, in Warner Bros.' moving drama Invictus from director Clint Eastwood.
Damon had to master a South African accent to play Pienaar, captain of Springbok. South Africa 's national rugby team. But the role also presented the actor with more physical challenges, starting with the most obvious. "I immediately went online and started reading about Francois and realized that he's a pretty big guy. I spoke to Clint and said, 'You know, this guy is huge,' and he said, 'Hell, you worry about everything else. Let me worry about that.'"
"Matt may not be the same height as Francois, but he has the same tenacity and power," Eastwood remarks. "He also worked out very hard and got himself in terrific shape for the film. And," the director adds, "by structuring set-ups and camera angles, you can make a person look the way you need them to look."
However, there were no cameras present when Damon met Francois for the first time. The actor relates, "Francois invited me to his home and made me this incredible gourmet dinner. When I got to his house, he answered the door and I just looked up at him. There was a pregnant pause, and I said, 'I look much bigger on camera.'"
Damon needn't have worried, as Pienaar says he was immediately impressed by the actor. "He's a great bloke. I was struck by his humility and his wicked sense of humor. He wanted to learn everything he could about me, my philosophy as a captain and what it was like for us in 1995. We also chatted about the game of rugby, what happens in training and about the technical aspects. We had a lot of fun."
"Francois was an enormous help to me. He spent a lot of time answering my questions about a whole host of different things," says Damon. "I felt a great sense of responsibility to do justice to him and this story because Francois has so much integrity and I believe Mandela is the greatest world leader of our time. It's incredible what they did and also what their country did."
Preparing for the rigorous demands of actually playing rugby, "the training was very intense," Damon states. "I did a lot of weightlifting and put on a lot of muscle. I also did sprints, which I'd never done before, and some boxing. When I got to South Africa , our rugby consultant said, 'You look really fit. What have you been doing?' I said, 'Well, I've been weightlifting, boxing and sprinting.' And he looked at me for a while and then goes, 'Why didn't you just play rugby?'" he laughs.
Damon got his chance to play rugby as he and the other actors spent time on the practice field. Eastwood notes, "When you're an amateur depicting a professional, you have a lot of practicing to do to appear as skilled as these men were. All of the actors who hadn't played rugby before had a lot of catching up to do. At the same time, we didn't want our cast to get hurt out there playing with the pros, so we were kind of crossing our fingers the whole time."
Collaborating with Eastwood for the first time, Damon says, "He's so fluent in the language of film; he knows exactly what will work in telling the story. As an actor, you feel very secure that you're in very, very good hands. It was a great experience working with him."
Opening soon across the Philippines, Invictus is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.