matt damon matthew mcconaughey impression

#Matt damon matthew mcconaughey impression full

“I knew what it was, and I always cared about it.” He has replicated her research process, immersing himself in the business of social enterprise until he found the cause that he felt passion for - water.ĭamon reads as equal parts hardworking, ambitious, grounded, and caring, the kind of celebrity you’d want your son to be if you had a son who could get both the girl and the point of fame.

“So I’d seen extreme poverty at an early age,” he says. In war-torn areas like El Salvador, she interviewed children, studied their artwork, and documented their trauma. “She specialized in nonviolent conflict resolution,” Damon explains. She brought her impressionable teenage son along. His mother, a professor of early childhood education, spent part of her summers living with local families in Guatemala and Mexico, attending language school in preparation for her field research. “If you want to understand how this works,” he says, sounding more like an anthropologist than a celebrity spokesperson, “there is no substitute for going there and talking to people in their homes.” It’s an approach he comes by honestly. Whether talking microfinance strategy with rural bankers, giving detailed reports from the field at the annual Clinton Global Initiative, or personally thanking donors like PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, Damon has quietly developed the cred of a program geek. But, in fact, it’s highly unusual for a celebrity to dive this deep into a problem this daunting. This would seem like an obvious and necessary first step for someone embracing the global water crisis as a personal mission.

He has turned himself into a development expert. “So we better get to work.”įor all his star power, though, Damon is more than just the pretty face of. “Our vision is clean water and sanitation for everyone, in our lifetime …” he trails off. “Clearly my strong suit is and will be trying to get people to care about this issue,” he says of his primary role. In spite of his attempt to blend in - Damon is wearing glasses, a splash of whiskers, and a Panavision baseball cap - he is unmistakable. As we make our way from a conference room at McKinsey in Midtown (a board member works there) to a car waiting on the street, I watch passersby light up in recognition and try to catch his eye. Come along and we’ll keep talking,” he tells me. “I have to pick up my daughter from school. It has been a long day but a good one, and Damon has more news to share.

#Matt damon matthew mcconaughey impression full

“And it doesn’t have to be.”ĭamon tells me this story on a rainy spring day in Manhattan, after a full schedule of board meetings for, the charity he cofounded in 2009, three years after his Zambia trip, with longtime water expert, and now dear friend, Gary White. “Of all the different things that keep people in this kind of death spiral of extreme poverty, water just seemed so huge.” He pauses. “Now she can hope to be a nurse and contribute to the economic engine of Zambia,” he says. Without access to the water, his companion would have been unable to go to school and would likely have been forced into a precarious fight for life, spending her days scavenging for often-filthy water in unhealthy and unsafe environments. “This is not something that most 14-year-olds have to go through,” says Damon, 40. Nearly 1 billion souls lack access to clean water three times that number lack access to proper sanitation. “I remembered so well the feeling of being young, when that whole world of possibility was open to you.”īut while Damon’s dream was made possible by Amtrak, the girl’s was possible only because somebody drilled a borewell near her home - and, yes, an hour’s walk for water is good news in lots of places in the world.

That connection opened the door for Damon. Damon recalled his dreams at the same age, when he and best friend Ben Affleck were plotting their way from Boston to casting agents in New York. When I asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up - ‘ Do you want to stay here?‘ ” he says, pointing to the memory of the dusty village - “she got shy all of a sudden.” As they returned, both toting 5-gallon jugs of water filled at the well, she finally confessed her dream: to go to the big city, Lusaka, and become a nurse. While walking with the young teen on her hour-long trudge to collect water for her family, something clicked. Every day brought a different subject: urban AIDS, microfinance, education, and, finally, water. “It was like a mini course in college,” he says. Damon was on a quest to understand what it meant to be really, really poor. The walk came toward the end of a 10-day African journey, a systematic primer on the complexities of the continent’s extreme poverty that had been organized for Damon by staffers from his friend Bono’s ONE campaign.