Sometimes, it’s the smallest tricks that help achieve perfection in one of the most challenging scenes. In the 2010 adaptation of Charles Portis’ 1968 novel, “True Grit,” Matt Damon faced a challenge and discovered that speaking tongue-tied for his character La Boeuf was the best way to handle it. The film, directed by the Coen Brothers and widely regarded as one of the few remakes that surpasses the original, featured Damon starring alongside Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn and Hailee Steinfeld in her debut role as Mattie Ross, a young woman seeking to avenge her father’s murder.
During the story, La Boeuf suffers a nasty injury after being dragged by a horse, nearly severing a large part of his tongue, drastically impairing his speech. As revealed in an interview, looking back on some of his best work, Damon recalled a clever trick that would make the issue audibly noticeable. “On the technical side, it was like trying to figure out the tongue thing when he gets his tongue injured,” Damon recalled to GQ. “And that we figured out I was sitting in a makeup trailer one day on another movie, and picked up a hair tie and just … started twisting it around my tongue, and just tried to speak normally, and that was how we kind of came up with that little gag.” Besides trying to fake a tongue injury, the other thing on Damon’s to-do list required him to be the best big-screen guardian for his co-star in her first film.
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Matt Damon and Jeff Bridges switched to parent mode for Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit
Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross and Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit – Paramount
It is still remarkable “True Grit” remains Steinfeld’s first major appearance on the big screen since it also happens be one of the greatest Westerns ever made. What’s unsurprising is the attention it received. Even before she earned an Oscar nomination as Ross, Damon and Bridges were stunned by Steinfeld’s performance during filming and quickly took her under their wing.
“You know and Hailee was like 13 and she was so sweet,” Damon said. “That was another situation where Jeff and I kind of as parents were like, very, everyone was to be fair, everyone there wanted to make sure she had a good time, and I think she really did.” Even after appearing in films like “Sinners,” “The Edge of Seventeen,” and “Begin Again,” “True Grit” still stands as the finest performance in her career, for which Damon had nothing but praise: “She was amazing too, she’s another one of those obscenely gifted … child actors.”
It proved to be an experience that stuck with Steinfeld, who, in an interview with Collider in 2020, still saw it as a benchmark she always went back to: “I do feel like I constantly refer back to that experience and try and pull on whatever it was that I learned and held onto because it was great.”
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