Paramount Pictures
These days, Matt Damon is co-starring in must-watch Netflix movies like “The Rip” and fronting Christopher Nolan’s exhausting yet exhilarating historical epic “The Odyssey.” But in the mid-’90s, he was just trying to get a foot in the door of Hollywood. In 1995, he decided that appearing alongside Sharon Stone, Russell Crowe, and Gene Hackman in a Sam Raimi-directed Western wasn’t the way to do so. Why? Because Damon had a very specific career path in mind, one modeled on the trajectory of a Hollywood great, and Raimi’s “The Quick and the Dead” just didn’t fit into the plan.
In 1995, Damon was still sharing an apartment with his pal Ben Affleck, and the pair were yet to write the drama that would turn them into Hollywood stars, “Good Will Hunting.” Damon had appeared in Walter Hill’s 1993 historical Western “Geronimo: An American Legend,” which also starred Hackman and Robert Duvall. The latter represented something of a role model to Damon. In fact, Duvall was a big part of the reason Damon decided to turn down the chance to re-team with Hackman for “The Quick and the Dead” two years later.
In “Matt Damon,” author Adam Woog states that Tri-Star offered Damon $250,000 to appear in Raimi’s Western, a sum that, at the time, would have changed his life. But the actor simply wasn’t interested. Woog quotes Damon as once having said, “I want the kind of career Robert Duvall has. I don’t feel [that] chasing movies like this is going to lead to a 40-year career. I’d rather be broke.” Clearly, he didn’t believe a self-aware, darkly funny Western was the way to emulate the career of a Hollywood great. But it didn’t exactly hurt Leonardo DiCaprio, who took the role of Fee “The Kid” Herod after Damon passed.
The Quick and the Dead wasn’t a major hit but it became a cult classic
Sony Pictures
“The Quick and the Dead” was written by Simon Moore as a somewhat of an homage to Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy. It’s very much part of the revisionist Western oeuvre, demonstrated most obviously by the fact that Sharon Stone plays the main gunslinger.
The film follows Stone’s character, known only as “The Lady” at first, as she arrives in the town of Redemption in 1881. The town is under the control of a cruel and conniving outlaw-turned mayor named John Herod (Gene Hackman). Three years prior, Hackman had played another unscrupulous Old West authority figure when he portrayed the crooked Sheriff Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s celebrated revisionist Western “Unforgiven.” Herod was arguably even more odious.
The mayor sets up a dueling competition that The Lady enters alongside Leonardo DiCaprio’s Fee “The Kid” Herod, who’s convinced the sadistic mayor is his father, and Russell Crowe’s gunfighter-turned-preacher, Cort. As the competition gets underway, we learn that Stone’s sharpshooter is in town to settle an old score.
Sadly, “The Quick and the Dead” was slow on the draw at the box office, making $18.6 million domestically, according to Box Office Mojo. According to Saturation.io, the film earned $28.6 million overseas, making for a global total of $47.2 million on a $32 million budget. Not a complete disaster, then, but far from a major hit. What’s more, critics were lukewarm at first, but the film has since become somewhat of a cult classic, and there’s no doubt the final shootout in “The Quick and the Dead” is one of the best action scenes ever. With that in mind, you’ve gotta wonder whether Damon was right to give up the role of The Kid to DiCaprio.
Was Matt Damon too cocky for his own good?
Sony Pictures
The same year “The Quick and the Dead” debuted, Matt Damon appeared in a now-forgotten Western opposite Tommy Lee Jones called “The Good Old Boys.” It’s not hard to see why someone determined to establish himself as a serious actor in the vein of Robert Duvall might have gone with Jones’ directorial debut over Sam Raimi’s riff on a Spaghetti Western. But the latter wasn’t quite the schlock Damon seemed to think it would be.
Two years after having turned it down, however, Damon hadn’t changed his tune. He spoke to Time magazine about his decision and recalled the conversation with his agent, wherein Damon said, “You know what I did last night? I watched ‘Bullitt,'” referring to Steve McQueen’s 1968 crime thriller in which Duvall plays a cab driver. “Robert Duvall drives a cab in that movie, and he has, like, four lines, but he was totally believable, and he was really good, and at the end of the day, he was in ‘Bullitt.’ He’s in all these great movies because he doesn’t do this kind of thing” — “this kind of thing” being Raimi’s Western.
That same agent, Patrick Whitesell, spoke to the New York Times in 2021 and recalled the stiff competition for the role of The Kid. In fact, Damon initially seemed interested and actually auditioned. “This was a movie that, on its surface, everybody wanted,” said Whitesell, who said his client started having doubts after having already impressed the casting producers. “Sharon Stone — great actress but a female gunslinger?,” Damon told Whitesell. “You’re not going to believe the movie.” Reflecting on things for the same NYT article, Damon said, “Probably too cocky for my own good.”