8 Great Actors Who Didn't Realise They Were Being Weirdly Typecast

3. Matt Damon Is...A Guy Who Always Needs Rescuing

Saving Private Ryan Interstellar The Martian Matt Damon
Paramount, Warner Bros & Fox

Matt Damon is cinema's prototypical "guy who needs to be rescued", and it only really works because audiences actually like the guy so damn much.

Examples: Damon is the sole survivor of four brothers fighting in WWII and a rescue mission is mounted to bring him home (Saving Private Ryan), astronauts launch a mission to rescue him after he claims the ice planet he inhabits can sustain life (Interstellar), and after he's stranded in Mars, a global effort is launched to bring him back safely (The Martian).

In each instance Damon's character is presumed to be extremely important, and a gigantic, arguably disproportionate mission is then launched to rescue him.

In the first two movies the missions cause deaths, while The Martian surprisingly doesn't feature a single fatality at all.

If Damon didn't seem like such a nice guy, it wouldn't be so easy to buy into these elaborate rescue missions for just one man, yet ironically the one truly vital mission of the three (in Interstellar) is also the only one where he ends up playing a duplicitous a**hole.

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Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.