Matt Damon said Jon Bernthal inspired the rest of the cast with one grueling scene early in production.
Damon recalled that Bernthal was half-submerged in icy water in Morocco during winter while filming a scene inside the Trojan Horse.
“Jon was shaking and putting his hands together and pressing so that he could get the shivers out so he could get one line of dialogue out,” Damon told People in an interview published last Thursday.
Christopher Nolan repeatedly checked in on Bernthal, but the actor simply urged him to keep filming. “John was just like, ‘Just go, just go,'” Damon recalled.
“That set the tone for the cast. The message was, at some point, you’re going to be the guy in the water, and you’re not going to complain about it. You’re going to push as hard as you can,” Damon said.
In a separate July interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Damon said Bernthal was the “first example of somebody pushing past what they thought they could do.”
“Nobody in that horse was ever going to complain for the next five months about anything because of what we saw,” Damon said.
