Forecast to make $1 billion at the box office, Matt Damon already has his best mate’s seal of approval for his portrayal of Greek warrior king Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey. Opening here next Friday (July 17) the $250 million movie prompted a once-in-a-lifetime congratulations call from Ben AffleckJason Bourne star Matt, 55, says: "Ben has seen the movie already. He called me recently and I was like ‘I have been waiting 45 years for this phone call.’”Attending the London premiere this week, with his film producer wife Luciana Barroso, 49, and daughters, Alexia, 27 - her child from a previous marriage - Isabella, 20, Gia, 17, and Stella, 15, Matt admits it’s the biggest blockbuster he’s been in.‌The first feature film shot entirely using IMAX film cameras, Ben says of the epic: "We made the movie for the IMAX giant screens and that is hard, but I am excited to share it with the world. We had some young actors in the movie. It is impossible not to root for them. They are such pros."Starring Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Samantha Morton and Charlize Theron, the film, directed by Christopher Nolan - who won best picture and best director Oscars for Oppenheimer in 2024 - is set in the Bronze Age.Matt, as legendary Greek king Odysseus, attempts to journey home to Ithaca after fighting in the decade long Trojan war. And he champions the director not just for his talent, but also for his stance on mobile phones.‌He says: "Chris very famously doesn't have a smart phone. He wants to preserve that time. Like let your mind wander rather than just instantly give it the dopamine hit of Candy Crush.”Matt also wants children to ditch smartphones and learn to entertain themselves again. He says: "Boredom was great growing up. Remember how bored you'd be as a kid? Then you'd figure something out. You'd figure out a way to entertain yourself or you'd go make something up."I always said to my wife early on after we had kids, ‘we’ve got to leave plenty of room for them to be bored’. And she said, ‘don't you worry’.”‌Decrying our addiction to smartphones, he adds: “This is a species-wide experiment." In our handset-obsessed world, he says it would be impossible to make another Jason Bourne spy thriller.The star, who made his fourth and final Bourne movie in 2016, says: "I mean Bourne would be on his phone now the whole time. Cut back to the CIA and everyone's just on their phones - the bad guys too. And then the tech overlords are making trillions of dollars. That's the movie!"You don't even need to pull your passport to get through airports now. So, Bourne would be totally screwed. The whole point was he had, you know, six passports and they all had different identities and he could speak all those languages!”‌Away from The Odyssey, Matt says he has been doing some thinking about his enduring friendship with Ben Affleck, 53. Childhood pals, they met when Matt was eight and Ben was six in Cambridge, Massachusetts, living just two blocks apart and sharing a love for baseball and acting.Running Artists Equity, an independent, artist-led production studio together since 2022, Matt likens their relationship to that of Paul McCartney and John Lennon in the 2021 Peter Jackson documentary The Beatles: Get Back.After watching it recently, Matt says: “It reminded me of how we both started out. At the end, there's this incredible scene when The Beatles play for the final time on the roof of Apple Records in London. It's like the most joyful thing as they are all in their 20s."‌He continues: "I watched it with my youngest daughter, who was 11 at the time, and she went, ‘Dad, why are you crying?’ The tears were just pouring down my face. It made me so sad, as there were these guys who couldn't get past whatever it was that wouldn't allow them to keep doing it together."So I just called Ben and I was like, ‘man, I think this was our dream and our lives from the time we were teenagers’. I mean we wanted to do movies together, we wrote Good Will Hunting together, starred in it together. After that we were a little allergic to working together for a while."Then, suddenly, a couple of decades went by and it was like, ‘now we're in our 50s. We're starting a company together and I don't care’.” Remembering their penniless launch into acting, before Good Will Hunting won two Oscars in 1998, Matt says: "We used to share a Bay Bank account that we would put money in that we had made professionally.""So, if we got any part or extra work, we would get $50 or $100 and that money would go into our shared account. We used the money to go for auditions in New York and we would take the bus from Boston."‌He continues: "It would take about four or five hours to get to New York. We would walk into some place in midtown Manhattan and they would just say after three minutes ‘OK, thanks!’ We used to call getting rejected ‘OK, thanks’. Because you used to go in there, beat your chest, pull your hair out and sob, and they just go, ‘OK, thanks’."But we had this account to rely on. We also used it to play video games at this place on Madison Avenue, buy beers and go to auditions. Those were the three uses for the account." The passcode for the account was named after late Hollywood idol River Phoenix, who died of a drug overdose in 1993, aged just 23.Speaking on the Conan O'Brien podcast, Matt says: "The code was ‘River P,’ because River Phoenix was an actor we really admired. He was our age, and he was getting the parts we wanted to play. So that was our secret code to get into our shared bank account."‌Today, with an estimated wealth of £130million and homes in New York and west Hollywood, Matt no longer needs the joint account. But he still treasures the thrill of every breakthrough the pair enjoyed, back in those early days.He says: "It feels as if you have won the lottery, but your best friend won it too. We've talked about that, Ben and I. And also just the fact that it didn't seem weird to us in the 1980s that we were 14 and 16 years old and going to New York by ourselves to audition for things."It was not until we had kids that we thought ‘can you f***ing believe that we would just go and audition like that?’ I mean, would you just let this kid go to San Francisco for the day by themselves? It seemed totally normal to us.‌“We loved starting out as extras. It can be demeaning work, but we loved being on sets. We were thrilled to be there, and yeah, I mean, it was starting out in the business."Now one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood, Matt worked very hard to get where he is and continues to do so, to stay at the top. He says: "Even as you get successful … you might have to break a lot of eggs to get the omelette. You know what I mean?”* The Odyssey opens in cinemas from next Friday, July 17.