Matt Damon, 55, Says ‘The Odyssey’ Cast Got Back Pain From Filming in Sandals

Matt Damon says the sandals worn in The Odyssey left the movie’s middle-aged cast with sore backs and battered feet.

The actor, 55, plays Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the ancient Greek epic. During an appearance on Andy Cohen’s Radio Andy SiriusXM channel, Damon said the cast wore sandals while filming the movie’s action sequences, including scenes staged on stone surfaces.

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“A lot of us are middle-aged people and what we got was back pain because, oh my God, running through Troy [one of the movie’s settings], it’s all stone,” Damon said on Radio Andy in a clip posted on July 21. “You’re in these sandals, and they’re very real.”

Other older actors in the cast include Jon Bernthal, 49, who plays Menelaus, and John Leguizamo, 66, who plays Eumaeus. The footwear also scraped the actors’ feet, but Damon said the pain traveled well beyond the scratches.

“Our feet were all scuffed up, but more than the little scratches and cuts on your feet, it was the back pain for us,” he said on Radio Andy. “It was a heavy Advil movie in those weeks when we were doing that action stuff.”

(From left) Jimmy Gonzales is Cepheus, Matt Damon is Odysseus and Himesh Patel is Eurylochus in “The Odyssey.”

Courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon/ Universal Studios

Damon’s discomfort is common among older adults. Back pain affects 45.6 percent of people 65 and older, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. “As we get older, we start to lose fluid in our discs,” Dr. Gbolahan Okubadejo, an orthopedic spine surgeon with the Institute for Comprehensive Spine Care in New Jersey, told AARP in 2024. As the discs lose fluid, he said, they tend to collapse, making the body stiffer and increasing the risk of injury.

That made the physical preparation for Odysseus especially demanding. Damon said on the July 7 episode of the Good Hang with Amy Poehler podcast that preparing for the role required a total lifestyle change. He ate less and eliminated gluten. He has continued avoiding gluten since filming, saying the change made him feel significantly better.

“I didn’t realize the level to which it was affecting me,” he said. “It’s completely changed my life these last couple years.”

The production filmed for 91 days in six countries, and one site required actors to make a 45-minute, 900-foot climb in costume and sandals.

“Every single location on this movie would’ve been the hardest location on any other movie I’ve ever done,” Damon told GQ in an interview published in June. “And they just went back-to-back.”

The long production also affected Damon’s family. He has been married to Luciana Damon since 2005. They have four daughters: Alexia, 27, Isabella, 20, Gia, 17, and Stella, 15. Alexia is Luciana’s daughter from a previous relationship. 

“They had to sacrifice a lot, too,” he told People at the London premiere of the film. “I went away for a while, they came and visited, but it was a lot. It was a very long movie, very grueling shoot.”