Matt Damon is considered a frontrunner for a best actor Oscar nomination for his work in The Martian, but the star said he doesn’t feel like he should win that Academy Award.
“Honest to God, there are other performances I would give it to,” Damon said on Wednesday’s Today when asked about the possibility of winning a best actor Oscar for The Martian.
Instead, Damon’s placing his Oscar hopes in a long-awaited Academy Award for director Ridley Scott, who has yet to win the trophy.
“I’m much more interested in the director race this year,” Damon added on Today, explaining that he thought Scott had received an Oscar when Gladiator won best picture but he didn’t because he wasn’t a producer on the film.
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“Our awards are all diminished until he wins one,” Damon said of Scott.
As for Scott, who joined Damon on the NBC morning show, he’s hoping to finally win an Oscar and already knows what he’ll tell the trophy if he does.
Laughing, Scott said: “If I ever get it I’ll say, ‘Where have you been?'”
During his Today appearance, Damon also responded to the online tally someone calculated of the total amount of money spent to rescue his characters from movies. He was surprised by both the figures for Saving Private Ryan ($100,000) and Interstellar ($500 billion). Of the former, Damon thought it seemed like a low number, particularly considering the lives lost. As for Interstellar, in which Damon’s appearance was a surprise, the actor quipped that that’s a lot of money “just for a cameo.”
He did seem relieved that while the grand rescue total is close to a trillion dollars, he’s “not there yet.”
