Matt Damon Credits Sylvester Stallone for Launching His Career at Nbr Dinner

The National Board of Review dinner on Tuesday night in Manhattan doubled as a victory lap for an old Hollywood champ, as Sylvester Stallone was showered with multiple tributes. Early in the evening, Matt Damon—this year’s winner for best actor in “The Martian”—revealed that when he was shopping around 1997’s “Good Will Hunting,” the fact that Stallone starred in “Rocky,” after writing the screenplay, kept him from letting another actor from stealing his movie. “Believe me, they really wanted to take it away from us,” Damon said, as he credited Stallone with both his and Ben Affleck’s acting careers. He revealed that studio executives thought, “God, Leonardo DiCaprio would be so good in this” of the screenplay he co-wrote. But, he added, “every time they said, ‘You can’t do this,’ we said, ‘It’s been done before.’”

Then came Stallone’s award for best supporting actor for “Creed. .... Read More »