Matt Damon likes doing cameos. Like, really likes them: A quick trip through Damon’s filmography will reveal single-scene, sometimes entirely wordless appearances in more than a dozen movies, as Damon has performed favors for old directors (see his 90-second appearance in Gus Van Sant’s Finding Forrester), hammed it up in big-budget Marvel flicks, or just showed up as a sight gag for his old pal George Clooney. And, apparently, the man isn’t shy about pitching himself for a single-scene day gig, either.
This is per a recent podcast appearance from Justin Bateman, who told Conan O’Brien about running into Damon backstage at the Golden Globes once, only to find himself fielding a pitch. “I remember Matt Damon coming up to me,” Bateman said during a recent appearance on Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend. “I was so excited to meet him and, and he was a huge fan of Arrested Development. And he was saying, ‘You know, I really think I could play, because I hear you guys are doing the movie, I think I could… can I play you?’”
This, Bateman explains, is because there was a pitch for a movie version of Mitch Hurwitz’s groundbreaking Fox sitcom kicking around at the time, which would have seen the Bluth family’s lives get adapted for an in-universe movie. (As fans of Scandal Makers and Gangie know, AD was never scared to go too meta or too Hollywood for a gag.) Damon, apparently, had gotten wind of the idea, and wanted to pitch a playing-as-himself appearance as actor Matt Damon, portraying Michael Bluth in the film-within-the-film. (Bateman doesn’t get specific about the timing here, but if we had to guess, this would be some time around the Golden Globes in 2014, when he was nominated for reprising the Michael role for the show’s first Netflix revival season, and when enthusiasm for the series’ return was running high; by time of his run of Ozark nominations a few years later, the bloom was pretty much off the rose.) We can kind of see it—Michael aspires to a put-upon Matt Damon everyman quality, even when he’s actually as deranged as the rest of his kin—but sadly, plans for the movie fell apart, and so Damon wasn’t able to add another quick and easy IMDB credit to his résumé. (When asked if Arrested Development is ever coming back again, meanwhile, Bateman didn’t mince words: “I don’t think anybody gives a shit. I think it’s done.”) Meanwhile, he also revealed that co-star Will Arnett was very close to getting Will Ferrell to play the movie version of Gob Bluth, and now we’re kind of genuinely mad this thing never actually got made.
