Matt of the people

With the exception of Michael Jackson, celebrities always seem more normal in real life than you’d expect, just as they almost always seem shorter.

You don’t imagine someone like Matt Damon eating his breakfast (or, more precisely, smoking his breakfast) inside a suite at Washington, D.C.’s Ritz-Carlton that’s starting to smell like a sports bar. You imagine him standing dramatically at cliff’s edge, staring into the distance with troubled eyes, but you do not imagine him clicking off his cordless phone and asking why radio personalities have to be so loud in the morning.

He starts telling you about how he spent the night before in Boston, where his new movie “The Bourne Supremacy” was being screened, and how his whole family was there and he’d missed them so much he didn’t want to leave, and he pushed back his flight and got in at 2 a.m.

Damon’s hair is short and jagged, not at all like the floppy blond cut he sported in the late ‘90s, when he became popular with “Good Will Hunting” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” With his jaunty nose and jutting ears, he looked clean-cut and all-American and a little like Dennis the Menace all grown up, and hot.

Now, at 33, his face is more angular. There is a little gray at his temples and grooves around the mouth when he smiles. A light stubble traces the sharp lines of the jaw and dusts his upper lip.

Damon has variously been described as the nice guy, the boy next door, apple-pie. And while clearly this has to do with his looks, he thinks it’s also connected to the way he behaves during interviews.

There are few professional duties he hates more than conducting the shallow, five-minute Q&A’s required for movie promotions. Some time ago, he says, a friend advised him to come up with an “alter ego” for these interviews, “so your soul doesn’t get, y’know, robbed by doing these things.” He calls this personality Mike Smiley, and says that when he watches footage of these interviews he sees Mike Smiley instead of himself.

“I can’t stand to look at it; it doesn’t feel like it’s who I am,” Damon says. “It feels like the person who’s being as polite as possible and just trying to get the thing over with.”

You wonder whom you’re getting. Is this Matt Damon or Mike Smiley? If this were not an interview, would Damon be ripping the filters off his American Spirits and eating his oatmeal with his fingers?

At last, you bum a cigarette and he leans over to light it. It’s as if you and he have a special connection, ashing into the same saucer, laughing at his foibles together. Ahahahaha! What a normal guy!

Poor Mike Smiley, with his sucked-out soul.

•

Damon was 2 when his parents divorced, though they remain on friendly terms. His mother, a professor of early childhood education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., has been a careful, sobering influence, worrying that his celebrity might make him into a “commodity” — as she once put it, a “cog in the capitalist system.”

Damon inherited his mother’s progressivism, which in Hollywood makes him utterly unremarkable. He stumped for Al Gore’s campaign and says he’d happily return the “millions and millions of dollars” that Bush’s 5 percent tax break gave him to “get some of the social programs back.” He recently did some voice-overs for Fleet Bank and — after consulting his family on how best to give the money away — donated it all to organizations working for peace and conflict resolution.

Damon has credited his mom’s focus on “open-ended play” with helping him discover his love of acting as a kid.

This is the story of how Matt broke his leg:

“Do you remember Shazam?” he asks. He talks about a childhood superhero who, “whenever he needed his superpowers, he’d call ‘Shazam’ and suddenly he’d be transformed and he could fly and stuff like that. And so I was on top of a jungle gym with my towel around my neck and I screamed ‘Shazam!’ and jumped. I think I was 3 years old.”

People are always trying to psychoanalyze celebrities, and how much can you interpret from a 3-year-old’s behavior, anyway? Still, you find yourself considering the stories you’ve heard about Damon’s intensity as an actor, and wondering if his ability to believe in his own transformations is what makes him good. Because he is good.

As Tom Ripley in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999), Damon was so pasty, so selfish, so needy, so creepy, that he actually became ugly. Remember that awkward stance, those too-big glasses atop a nose that — next to Jude Law’s delicate features — looked crudely fashioned? Remember him on the beach, wearing a pair of lime-green bathing trunks, pale amid golden bodies? Remember his blank stares and his rows of gleaming, barbaric teeth?

For “Courage Under Fire” (1996), he lost 40 pounds by running 13 miles a day and eating a diet of chicken, egg whites, potatoes and other vegetables. He did it without a doctor’s supervision and inadvertently induced what he has described as an adrenaline disorder, for which he had to take medication.

For “The Bourne Identity” (2002), based on the Robert Ludlum books about an amnesiac assassin, Damon took up boxing and martial arts training. For “Supremacy,” the sequel that reached theaters on Friday, he kept up the boxing. In both movies Damon does most of the fight scenes himself, to make them more believable; this time, he threw out his back.

Damon has said he likes the Bourne series because it is character-driven, setting it apart from more vapid action movies. In both movies, you observe some of Jason Bourne’s thought processes. He is clever but not indomitable; instead of magically knowing where to go when he’s speeding along in his car, he studies a map.

•

It’s hard not to compare Damon with Ben Affleck, with whom he entered mainstream consciousness thanks to 1997’s “Good Will Hunting.” They received an Oscar for the screenplay, and Damon was nominated for an Oscar for the title role as Will, the genius janitor of MIT.

Affleck and Damon grew up a few blocks from each other in Cambridge. They remain best friends and have collaborated on a number of projects, but their public images have diverged.

There was a moment last year when Affleck was asked if he was going to marry Jennifer Lopez, and he joked that he would marry Damon instead. The papers dubbed this Mattfleck. But the perception of Matt and Ben as peas in a pod had long since been killed off.

While Damon was lying low, trying to stay normal, Affleck was showing up in J.Lo’s music video and on celebrity magazine covers and in rehab — embracing, it seemed, all the trappings of modern Hollywood stardom. While Affleck took on mainstream movies like “Bounce” and “Changing Lanes,” Damon seemed to be more discriminating. Damon’s “All the Pretty Horses,” a disappointment at the box office, did not become a punch line like Affleck’s “Gigli.”

In short, you take Damon seriously. He went to Harvard before dropping out to pursue his dream. He talks about missing the ordinariness of his former life, and the way anonymity allowed him to be a fly on the wall when he was developing characters, and the way it allowed him to simply live.

“You have to preface everything by saying, ‘Look, I’m not complaining, I’m incredibly blessed,’ ” he says. “But anonymity is something that is an incredibly valuable commodity and you’re not aware that it’s gone until it’s gone. …

“You meet people who’ve been famous for a long time and as much as they try and safeguard against it and as vigilant as they are about trying to protect their humanity, it has an effect.”

For years Damon has been close-lipped about his love life. After dating Minnie Driver and Winona Ryder, he has vowed not to date any more celebrities — or at least has come as close as a cautious guy can get to vowing.

“It’s always silly to say ‘never’ in these interviews — then people come back and throw it in your face,” he says. “But I can’t imagine being with a celebrity. … It kind of magnifies exponentially the whole part of this thing that I don’t like, and that really gets in the way of doing my job and interferes with the life part of life. I mean, just look at what happened to Ben.”

Damon is currently involved with a single mom he met while she was bartending. When asked about it, his face softens and he looks down into his lap. You can hear the smile in his voice.

“Without getting into it too much, she’s, uh, she’s yeah, she’s great,” he says. “She’s a mom, and yeah, she’s fantastic. It’s going well.”

He looks as if he’d like to say more, the way people in love do. But he stops himself.