Riding high on his virtuosic performance in “The Informant!,” comes the news that Matt Damon will star in his “Invictus” director Clint Eastwood’s next project, “Hereafter.” The news dropped yesterday as a small mention in this USA Today profile on Damon.
The Peter Morgan (“Frost/Nixon“) scribed script had been picked up by Spielberg at DreamWorks/Paramount in March 2008, and he held onto it when those two companies parted ways. He finally lured Eastwood onboard to direct last November.
It’s been described as a thriller in the vein of “The Sixth Sense,” though this Movie Line post seems to think “thriller” is a bit of a misnomer, unless there have been some major changes to the script they got their hands on last spring. It does have a supernatural bent, though, as Damon plays a character named George, a factory worker with the ability to commune with the dead, not a talent he’s so thrilled about (Haley Joel Osment, all grown up!) There are two other plotlines involving a French journalist coping with the aftermath of a near-death experience during the 2004 tsunami, and a 12-year old British boy searching for a way to contact his dead twin. ScriptShadow has a more extensive review, and it sounds like three people who are each trying to understand their experiences with death and the afterlife, and feeling very alone in the process. Damon’s dance card is full for the foreseeable future- he’s shooting “The Adjustment Bureau” with Emily Blunt, then ‘Hereafter,’ and THEN he will re-team with his ‘Informant!’ director Steven Soderbergh to play Liberace’s lover, opposite Michael Douglas as the be-sequined pianist. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll get to Bourne 4 sometime after that?