Matt Damon had been playing Jason Bourne for so long, he knew what made the ultimate wish fulfillment character tick. He’d gotten to know the role so well, however, that he could tell when the assassin was being written out of character. And when that happened, it potentially jeopardized the quality of the movie.

Matt Damon felt Jason Bourne should remain a silent assassin

Like many action heroes, Damon’s Jason Bourne was known for having an arsenal of skills at his disposal. But unlike other spies such as James Bond, Bourne generally doesn’t say all that much in his movies. The assassin’s silent but deadly approach has become a key component to his character. So much so that changing it meant that someone was doing something wrong when it came to developing a Bourne project.

“If I start saying too much, then it’s generally not working,” Damon once told Rotten Tomatoes. “We went through the whole second act of the movie last time and Bourne didn’t really talk at all for probably 45 minutes to an hour of that movie. So contriving people for him to talk to is a mistake, it just doesn’t feel right, it feels like he should be on his own. The difficulty lies in trying to tell a story. The way you’d normally tell a story is through the characters talking to one another!”

Damon further explained how he and his team had to work around Bourne’s lack of dialogue. Especially when it came to letting audiences know what was going on in his movies.

“Yeah, it’s definitely challenging to try to relate plot that way,” Damon said. “And that’s why the B side of our story, normally, has a lot of Johnny Explainer scenes and on the B side because there are computers all around them and they’re going ‘what’s he doing?’ and it’s ‘I think he’s doing this!’ or ‘Well, I think he’s doing that!’ to kinda help because on this side of the story we don’t tend to fill in the blanks very well.”

Still, Damon shared that playing such a silent character could be a problem for the franchise’s director Paul Greengrass.

“It’s a bigger challenge for Paul because I can walk around and think about whatever I want to think about but it’s not going to make any sense unless he puts me in some kind of context that explains what I’m doing,” Damon said. “An actor can sit there and think about his dog dying but if you cut to a shot of a roast turkey, people are going to think he’s hungry so it’s really up to the director to contextualize what the actor’s doing or else I’m just the guy who’s walking around, brooding.”

Matt Damon only had 25 lines in the last Jason Bourne movie

The first time Damon was cast as Bourne in Bourne Identity, the film’s director, Tony Gilroy, felt the need to warn him. Gilroy was worried that Damon wouldn’t be comfortable playing a character he said so little. However. Damon couldn’t have been more receptive to the idea. Although, in The Bourne Identity, he probably said more in that film than he did in any of its sequels.

“Well, I’ve done it three times. In the first movie, the Marie Kreutz character [Bourne’s girlfriend, played by Franka Potente) is still alive, so Bourne has a sounding board and he’s more confused about who he is and a lot more chatty. Once she dies in the first act of the second movie, it’s really a very lonely character. And we talked about that mostly on the second one. I remember Tony writing me an email saying, ‘You do realise what this means? You do realise you’re not going to talk in this movie.’ I said, ‘No, I love that,’” Damon said in an interview with The Guardian.

However, with the 2016 sequel Jason Bourne, Damon only had 25 lines to say in the entire 2 hour movie. But Greengrass felt Damon was more than up to the task.

“I think what makes a Bourne movie is the violence and the set pieces,” Damon said. But there’s a tremendous amount of emotionality in the character.”