Matt Damon

Matt Damon wrote his way in. He had been acting since Mystic Pizza in 1988 without much happening when Good Will Hunting arrived in 1997, a script he and Ben Affleck wrote together and then starred in. It won them the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a Golden Globe, and it made a leading man out of someone whose face is fundamentally that of a nice guy from Boston.

He has spent the rest of the career complicating that. The Talented Mr. Ripley is the early proof, a young man whose most alarming quality is how badly he wants to be liked. The Departed uses the same blankness as camouflage for a rat inside the Massachusetts State Police. Interstellar gives him fifteen minutes and asks him to be the film's worst human being, and the casting is the joke. Very few stars of his size volunteer this often to be the least sympathetic person on screen.

The other half of the career is competence rendered well. Jason Bourne rewired the action genre around procedure and geography instead of one-liners, and Ocean's Eleven made him the crew's junior member, which he plays as faintly embarrassed. In The Martian he holds a two-hour film almost alone by treating survival as an engineering assignment, and won a Golden Globe for Best Actor doing it.

Since then he has moved into the character-actor lane deliberately, playing a general in Oppenheimer, a car designer in Ford v Ferrari and a knight in The Last Duel who is written to be unbearable and played that way without hedging. By 2010 he was among the highest-grossing actors in film history, which is not the shape most people expect a screenwriter's career to take.