Exclusive: Matt Damon Has Secret Role In Marvel’s Thunderbolts
The actor who played a stage actor playing Loki is returning to Marvel to play… someone? Our trusted and proven sources tell us Matt Damon has signed on for a top secret role in the upcoming film Thunderbolts. They tell us the Oppenheimer star agreed to the role before the SAG-AFTRA strike began, and plans to join the cast once production resumes.
We’ve exclusively learned Matt Damon has joined the cast of Marvel’s Thunderbolts in a secret role.
We don’t know who Matt Damon will play in Thunderbolts, but for anyone who’s been following the MCU‘s releases, the first question is whether or not it will have any connection to the small comedic role he originated in 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok and reprised in last year’s Thor: Love and Thunder.
In both cases, the Good Will Hunting star plays an actor portraying Tom Hiddleston’s Loki in stage productions. In the Thor films he’s joined by other stars like Luke Hemsworth (Stage Actor Thor), Sam Neill (Stage Actor Odin), and Melissa McCarthy (Stage Actor Hela).
It’s possible Matt Damon will play the same role in Thunderbolts, likely in another comedic cameo. It’s also possible he’s playing a new character with no connection to his Asgardian thespian.
There are more actors than you may realize who have played more than one role in the MCU. In most cases when those actors have played more than one role, either one or more of the roles involve makeup/prosthetics and/or plenty of CGI, or one of the actors’ roles is in a production whose connection to the MCU is murky.
For example, Alfre Woodard had a cameo in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War before showing up as Black Mariah in Netflix‘s Luke Cage. Likewise, Mahershala Ali appeared as the bad guy Cottonmouth in Luke Cage before being cast as the next Blade. But it remains unclear how canonical the Netflix series are in terms of the MCU.
Damon’s Thor character has never been given a proper name, and so there’s been some debate as to whether Damon is meant to be playing a fictional version of himself — like Kevin Bacon in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special — or an actual Asgardian character.
Since both of the Thor movies Matt Damon appeared in and Thunderbolts will definitively be a part of the MCU, it seems most likely the actor will play either a CGI-rendered character or one under plenty of makeup.
Considering all the monsters, aliens, mutants, cyborgs, sentient robots, etc. in the source material whose adaptation could necessitate plenty of CGI and/or makeup, without more information it seems a waste of time to even make a guess.
Matt Damon As Ragnarok?
Matt Damon could be reprising his stage actor role in Thunderbolts in a cameo or he could play someone completely new.
There is another possibility, though it is admittedly a stretch. Matt Damon could be reprising his stage actor role in Thunderbolts, but as a version that has “leveled up.”
Damon’s Thor character has never been given a proper name, and so there’s been some debate as to whether Damon is meant to be playing a fictional version of himself — like Kevin Bacon in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special — or an actual Asgardian character. Assuming his character is Asgardian, he could be playing the MCU version of Ragnarok.
In the 2006 Marvel Comics Civil War event, it’s revealed that Tony Stark and Reed Richards cloned Thor. They foolishly unleash him on the anti-registration heroes, and soon after he murders Goliath (Laurence Fishburne’s MCU character). In the event’s final battle the Cloned Thor is seemingly killed by Hercules, but he’s later revived as Ragnarok.
If Matt Damon were to play Ragnarok in Thunderbolts, then obviously his origin would be different from that of the source material. But that would hardly make him the first hero or villain in the MCU with an altered origin tale.
It might actually be fitting for Matt Damon to play Ragnarok in Thunderbolts. When he comes back as Ragnarok in the comics, he’s inducted into a version of the Dark Avengers which is essentially just the Thunderbolts with a different name.
We’ll hopefully learn more as the time that we’ll get to actually see Matt Damon in Thunderbolts gets closer. Its release date is currently set at December 20, 2024, but production has been put on hold indefinitely because of the writers’ strike.
