How the ‘famously’ phoneless Christopher Nolan gets in touch with actors
How the ‘famously’ phoneless Christopher Nolan gets in touch with actors
Shania RussellSat, July 18, 2026 at 7:23 PM UTC
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Matt Damon and Christopher Nolan attend ‘The Odyssey’ premiere on July 11Credit: Aalok Soni/GettyKey Points -
Matt Damon is revealing what it was like to get a call from Christopher Nolan about The Odyssey.
Spoiler alert: getting in touch with the famously phoneless director is, itself, a bit of a journey.
It began with a text and then Damon got a call from “a nondescript number.”
Getting a call from Christopher Nolan is every actor’s dream. But the way it happens is stranger than you might expect.
As it turns out, the Hollywood legend isn’t just old-school when it comes to his penchant for practical filmmaking. Matt Damon, who fronts Nolan’s epic retelling of The Odyssey, recently revealed that the director’s communication methods are also pretty vintage.
Instead of calling actors up directly, Nolan first gets his wife and producing partner Emma Thomas to send them a text. Why? “Because Chris famously doesn’t have a phone,” Damon recently told PEOPLE.
Damon shared that his journey to becoming Odysseus began when Thompson texted to ask, “‘Are you around for a call today?’”
He explained that when Nolan wants to get in touch, it’s always Thompson who “gives you a heads-up if he’s going to call.”
Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas attend the 96th Oscars Nominees Luncheon on February 12, 2024.Credit: Amy Sussman/WireImage
After the text, Nolan reaches out. But since he doesn’t own a phone or have his own number, it’s pretty hard to tell when the caller is the Oscar-winning director.
“You get a phone call from a nondescript number,” Damon explained. “Because he’s just picking up a line at Universal Studios.”
Even Nolan, he pointed out, “doesn’t know what number” he’ll be calling from.
In Damon’s case, it didn’t even occur to him that the call from Nolan would be about a film role. “He called and we chatted for 10 or 15 minutes,” Damon recounted. “It was only six months after Oppenheimer had gone through the Oscars and all of that.”
Damon assumed Nolan was in for an extended break after directing the epic biopic and then hitting the campaign trail. “I just thought we were catching up, which we did,” Damon shared. “And then he blurted out, ‘Yeah, I’m thinking of going back to work.’ And I went, ‘Wait, already?’”
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Damon serves as the lead of the star-studded cast, which also features Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Elliot Page, and Samantha Morton. The film marks a reunion between Damon and Nolan after working together on 2014’s Interstellar and 2023’s Oppenheimer.
Nolan previously shared that while he didn’t write the role with Damon in mind (“I try to just discover the characters through the process of writing”), he knew after its completion that the Good Will Hunting alum would be his Odysseus.
During a visit to Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast earlier this month, he explained that he needed someone with the “empathetic ability to draw the audience into a character’s dilemma.
Matt Damon in ‘The Odyssey’Credit: Universal Pictures
“[Matt] has that openness. He brings the audience with him,” Nolan said. “But he also can project an iconic, frankly, superhero presence. He’s, you know, he’s the guy from The Martian or We Bought a Zoo and Good Will Hunting— and then he’s Jason Bourne. And to be able to do such disparate things and sort of fuse them into a character was exactly what I needed.”
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Meanwhile, Damon has made it clear that he’s always willing and ready to take Nolan’s call. During EW’s Around the Table for Oppenheimer in 2023, Damon said that he worked a Nolan exemption into an agreement with his wife, Luciana Barroso.
“This is going to sound made up, but it’s actually true,” Damon began during a chat with Nolan and costars Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, and Robert Downey Jr. “I had — not to get too personal — negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off. I had been in Interstellar, and then Chris put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation, but I actually negotiated in couples therapy — this is a true story — the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called.”
He said he did so without even knowing whether Nolan was working on something — and given the Oppenheimer and The Odyssey back-to-back, it clearly worked out.
The Odyssey is in theaters now.
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
