Eagle-eyed viewers spot Matt Damon and David Letterman’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos in hit HBO show - The Independent

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Matt Damon may have commanded top billing on some of the decade’s biggest blockbusters, but that isn’t stopping him from taking on a much smaller, uncredited role.

The actor, who recently led Christohper Nolan’s star-studded adaptation of The Odyssey, made a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in the season four premiere of The Gilded Age.

HBO’s hit historical drama, set in 1880s New York City, returned to screens on Sunday (1 November), with Damon making a surprise appearance alongside David Letterman.

Eagle-eyed viewers spotted the two stars around eight minutes into the first episode – 8.33 to be precise – portraying two gentlemen crossing the street together.

Damon can be seen wearing a top hat as well as a white shirt and an ascot underneath a long coat. Also sporting a moustache and sideburns, the actor looked unlike his usual self. Letterman, meanwhile, donned an all-black ensemble together with a bowler hat. The talk show host, however, was more recognisable given he was flaunting the same distinctly bushy grey beard he has been for years.

Neither of the actors utter a single word in the fleeting scene, which was noticed by several viewers who took to social media to share their surprise.

“Matt Damon and David Letterman?! So random but I love it!” said one person on X. “Matt Damon and David Letterman popping up in 1880s New York is the crossover nobody asked for and everybody needed,” added someone else.

A third person wrote: “Letterman and Matt Damon both showed up as background guys in The Gilded Age season 4 premiere, top hats and canes and a very serious walk. Imagine being a late-night legend and your big return is strolling past a carriage. You’d think Damon would at least get a line, fr?”

“Matt Damon & David Letterman making nanoseconds-long background cameos in The Gilded Age season premiere is so stupid & funny,” said another. “I love it.”

Suffice to say, viewers were stunned to see the A-list actor and late night talk show legend agree to such minor roles on screen.

According to Isabel Richardson, the showrunner of Netflix’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman, the starry moment came about as a result of Letterman’s nearly 50-year-long mission to become a background actor after seeing his friend, comedian Gary Mule Deer, appear as “Man at Health Food Restaurant” in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.

Letterman was “tickled by the fact that this guy was recognisable to him in the shot, but that most people probably didn’t recognise him,” said Richardson in an interview with Vulture.

It was when Richardson began researching Damon as a guest for Letterman’s show that they discovered that he had started his career as a background actor alongside fellow Hollywood star Ben Affleck.

“We thought, ‘Okay, this could be the perfect opportunity,”’ Richardson said. “It’d be really fun for Dave to do this with Academy Award-winner Matt Damon, and it tied into his origin story really well.”

Damon said yes to the concept, which featured on a list of proposed ideas for his forthcoming episode of Letterman’s show.

Richardson and her team then set out to find a show for the duo to appear in, and landed on The Gilded Age, pitching the idea to the show’s executive producer Kate Churchill.

Churchill told Vulture: “It was a kind of hysterical moment when our production supervisor Leah Baker came up to me on set and was like, ‘Well, I have a kind of funny, interesting question: Would you like Dave Letterman and Matt Damon to be background on our set one day?’ I just started laughing.”

Churchill said she wanted to make sure that the duo would not be a distraction from the action, and so decided to shoot it in a “very controlled manner” on a set that the public cannot access, which meant that they could only film on a very limited number of days, making scheduling extremely tricky.

“I have to really give credit to our studios because a simple idea was actually quite complicated,” Churchill said. “Things like, Matt had to be paid as a background person, but of course he works under his own company.

“There were a lot of emails going around, but people really locked arms, and both studios saw that it was a fun collaboration where we could help each other.”

Despite their A-List status, Damon and Letterman had to jump through the same hoops as any background actor would, and were asked to come in for a fitting with the show’s costume designer.

That said, on the day of filming, both stars had their own trailers – something that Damon had to clarify to Letterman was not typical for background actors.

While Damon and Letterman have gone uncredited in the series, it seems that the talk show host got his wish in following his friend Gary Mule Deer’s footsteps as a background actor with fans similarly doing a double take to see if it really was him in this surprise non-speaking role.

Season four of The Gilded Age continues with new episodes on Sunday nights.