Matt Damon says he 'fell into a depression' while shooting a movie that was not what he 'hoped it would be'

Matt Damon said he "fell into a depression" while shooting a movie he knew was particularly bad.

He said he was left asking himself, "What have I done?" before his wife encouraged him to carry on.

The actor previously described his 2016 alien invasion movie "The Great Wall" as a "turkey."

Matt Damon said he fell into a "depression" while shooting a movie that he quickly realized wasn't quite up to his standards.

"Without naming any particular movies, sometimes you find yourself in a movie that, you know, perhaps, might not be what you had hoped it would be, and you're still making it," the actor said in an interview on the YouTube series "Jake's Takes."

The "Oppenheimer" star said that halfway through production on one such movie, the sinking feeling set in when he assessed how much he had upended his family's lives for the role.

"You've still got months to go and you've taken your family somewhere, you know, and you've inconvenienced them," he continued. "And I remember my wife pulling me up because I fell into a depression."

The 52-year-old star said he was left asking himself, "What have I done?" before his wife urged him to carry on because there was little else he could do.

Damon and Luciana Barroso have been married since 2005 and share four daughters — Alexia, 24, Isabella, 17, Gia, 13, and Stella, 12.

"She just said, 'We're here now'," Damon recalled.

"I do pride myself, in a large part because of her, at being a professional actor and what being a professional actor means is you go and you do the 15-hour day and give it absolutely everything, even in what you know is going to be a losing effort."

"And if you can do that with the best possible attitude, then you're a pro," he continued. "And she really helped me with that."

While Damon has starred in several Academy Award-winning films, he's also been part of several critically and commercially panned movies.

On Rotten Tomatoes, "Downsizing," "Suburbicon," "The Monuments Men," and "The Brothers Grimm" are among some of the actor's worst-rated movies.

Singling out the 2016 alien invasion movie "The Great Wall" in a 2021 interview on "WTF with Marc Maron," Damon described it as a "turkey" that he knew was doomed before filming had finished.

In the film, Damon plays a mercenary warrior imprisoned within the Great Wall of China who joins forces with the Chinese to combat an alien invasion. Damon said he initially thought the plot was similar to films like "'Lawrence of Arabia," "Dances With Wolves," and "Avatar."

But when Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou bowed to pressure from Hollywood backers and sacrificed his vision of the film, Damon saw things begin to crumble.

"I was like, this is exactly how disasters happen," the actor told Maron. "It doesn't cohere. It doesn't work as a movie."

"I came to consider that the definition of a professional actor; knowing you're in a turkey and going, 'OK, I've got four more months. It's the up at dawn siege on Hamburger Hill. I am definitely going to die here, but I'm doing it.'"

"That's as shitty as you can feel creatively, I think. I hope to never have that feeling again."

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