There is something quietly amusing about one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars admitting that sandals nearly broke him. Matt Damon, currently starring as the warrior-king Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s sweeping adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, revealed during a recent appearance on Radio Andy that the film’s ancient costuming exacted a surprisingly modern toll on its cast — back pain, scuffed feet, and a heavy reliance on Advil.
Damon, 55, was candid with host Andy Cohen about what it actually felt like to run action sequences across stone-paved sets while wearing period-accurate sandals. “A lot of us are middle-aged people and what we got was back pain because, oh my god, running through Troy, it’s all stone,” he said, describing the shoot with the kind of rueful honesty that only comes from lived experience. The footwear, he noted, was “very real” — not the cushioned approximations one might hope for — and the cast’s feet bore the evidence, scuffed and cut from repeated takes. But it was the spinal punishment that lingered longest.
The nearly three-hour Nolan production adapts Homer’s ancient Greek epic for a contemporary audience, and the scale of the undertaking is evident even in these small physical details. Damon plays Odysseus, the cunning king of Ithaca whose decade-long journey home from the Trojan War forms the backbone of one of Western literature’s oldest and most enduring narratives. Tom Holland plays his son Telemachus, and Anne Hathaway portrays Penelope, Queen of Ithaca — a cast whose collective profile speaks to the ambition Nolan brought to the project.
The back pain was not Damon’s only challenge. Well before cameras rolled, he undertook what he described to People magazine as “a whole lifestyle change” to sculpt himself down to 167 pounds of functional muscle. The transformation was less about dramatic bulk and more about disciplined conditioning — a shift in diet that included cutting gluten, and a broader reckoning with intentionality. “You have to just be very, very intentional about everything you put in your body,” he said, words that carry a certain weight when spoken by a man who then spent weeks sprinting across ancient stonework in leather sandals.
During the film’s global press tour, Damon also appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where he recounted a backstage moment involving Holland’s costume, which had apparently begun choking him mid-scene. Damon admitted he misread Holland’s distress signal as an acting choice — a small, human comedy tucked inside the grandeur of an epic production. It is exactly the kind of detail that reminds audiences that even the most meticulously crafted films are, at their core, made by people doing their best under imperfect conditions, middle-aged backs and all.
