REIGN MAN

By DAVID BLUM

When you've got a lot of chips, it's easier to keep winning," Matthew Paige Damon confided the other evening as we settled into our seats for several hands of seven-card stud, high-low. We were hanging out in a private poker club in New York City, and none of the players had a clue that the baby-faced kid pulling up to the table was within days--perhaps hours--of becoming a Big Movie Star.

Yet they saw in Damon the same thing Hollywood does--an all-American beer-drinking dude, with an appealing self-assurance. The 27-year-old actor's gambling strategy was to raise, raise, raise--an approach that suited a wealthy young man whose annual salary just went north of $1 million, but whose cards weren't what you'd call a sure thing. Long after lower-paid mortals folded, Damon continued to bet like a winner; he'd arrived at the table with $200 and left only $20 poorer, which of course did nothing to deter the amiable grin that rarely leaves his soon-to-be-familiar face.

That may have been Damon's last lick of anonymity before he headed into the red-hot center of American celebrity, going from being a guy to being the Guy. Damon has begun a run of major Hollywood star turns, starting with Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker, following with the December release of Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting (from a script Damon co-wrote) and continuing next June with Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.

"Actors like Matt are in as good a position as they've ever been," observes Coppola, who chose Damon over fellow finalist Edward Norton for the lead in the new John Grisham star vehicle. "They've become the trademarks of the movies, not the directors. There's barely a movie that can be made without Cage or Ford or Pitt. Now they determine what movies get made." As for Damon's qualifications for joining the short list, Coppola says, "Matt has got the gift--and he's a writer in his own right. That gives him something special." That plus the fact that Damon's salary remains a fraction of his more famous peers, an attractive prospect to studios in search of new talent.

Damon is pleased but bewildered by the power at his disposal. "It's like I'm living somebody else's life," he had said as we wandered aimlessly and unrecognized around lower Manhattan a few days before the card game and a week before his face landed on the cover of Vanity Fair. "I don't have an apartment; my stuff is in a warehouse in New Jersey. I'm making three movies in a row for all this money... I'm not complaining, you know. But I mean, why is it all happening to me? And if people are expecting this much, will they be mad if I let them down? I don't want to be a flash in the pan. I don't want to lose it all."

He's right to worry. Hollywood anoints these new young stars with alarming frequency, and can abandon them just as fast when they stumble. But for the moment, there's not much time left for Damon to consider such questions. He's too busy. He just turned down an offer to star in the next film by Ang Lee, who directed the Oscar-nominated Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm. That was so he could do the next film from the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, Anthony Minghella. Damon will play the title role in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Minghella's adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel about a charming con man driven to murder. Until recently, scripts sent to him had multiple sets of fingerprints on them; this one came straight from Tom Cruise's reject pile. "There's something so apple pie about him," says Minghella. "You know he was the best-looking kid in his school, won all the awards at track and field and dated the most popular girl."

The second son of a now divorced college-professor mom and tax-expert dad, Damon grew up in Cambridge, Mass., watching movies, studying the acting styles of idols like Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall and plotting his acting career. His mother, a child-development expert, encouraged her sons to engage in the creative use of blocks and the fun of make-believe. It worked: Damon's brother Kyle, 30, became a sculptor, and young Matt started acting at age 12. By the time he was 17, he'd already got his first movie role, with one line in the 1988 film Mystic Pizza.

His breakthrough came as a Gulf War veteran turned heroin addict in the 1996 drama Courage Under Fire. In a move reminiscent of De Niro's weight gain for Raging Bull, Damon dropped 40 lbs. for a two-day scene opposite Denzel Washington. It created an anorexia-like medical condition (from which he only recently recovered), but the intensity of his performance convinced the industry that Damon was a serious actor.

By that time Damon had taken steps to ensure that Hollywood would take notice of more than his acting. With Stallone-like hubris, he and best friend Ben Affleck--another hot actor, who starred in Chasing Amy and grew up two blocks away from Damon--wrote the screenplay for Good Will Hunting, based on a play Damon had started writing as a Harvard student. (He still has two semesters to go for his degree.) Damon and Affleck attached themselves to the project as stars. The script--about the struggles of a young working-class math genius in South Boston--sold to Castle Rock Entertainment for $500,000 and gave Damon his first glimpse into the Hollywood power machine.

"We had really serious creative differences with them" is all he says about the Castle Rock experience. But other sources close to the movie say Damon and Affleck became dismayed when they realized Castle Rock never intended to show the script to an established director but instead planned to hand it off to Castle Rock partner Andrew Scheinman, whose only previous directing credit was the forgettable 1994 movie Little Big League. The young actors returned their material to the marketplace, where Miramax bought it from Castle Rock. Commitments from director Van Sant and co-star Robin Williams made the project happen the way they always dreamed it would. This also led to an ongoing romance between Damon and his co-star Minnie Driver.

Damon began making his lofty ambitions clear as early as 1993, when, after small but memorable performances in the 1992 film School Ties and 1993's Geronimo: An American Legend, he was offered a part in the Sharon Stone movie The Quick and the Dead--a highly coveted job for an actor still sleeping on a friend's couch. But Damon didn't like the script and wanted to pass. "You know what I did last night? I watched Bullitt," he remembers telling his agents. "Robert Duvall drives a cab in that movie, and he has, like, four lines, but he was totally believable and he was really good and at the end of the day, he was in Bullitt. He's in all these great movies because he doesn't do this kind of thing." The role later went to Leonardo DiCaprio.

All that has changed. "The funny thing is," Damon told me last week, "that as soon as you get big, the studios send you these scripts that they've been trying to get made for 20 years, that were originally written for Dustin Hoffman. They've been sitting on the shelf. You get their old standbys." What he didn't mention is that the roles also come with $2 million offers.

But for now Damon is making his choices on the basis of the part, not the paycheck. He seems content with the $600,000 he will be paid to appear in Rounders, the poker movie he's getting ready to shoot for Miramax. ("They've been great to me," says Damon.) It's from a first script by two unproduced young screenwriters and will be directed by The Last Seduction's John Dahl, who after four pictures has yet to make a major commercial success. No one seems to be very worried about its prospects, though. Maybe that's because the whole project is built around a hot young movie star.