Confused by the way Matt Damon was portrayed in Trey Parker and Matt Stone‘s 2004 puppet epic “Team America: World Police”? You’re not the only one. Damon was pretty befuddled by it himself.
During an Ask Me Anything Q&A session on Reddit on Wednesday, the “Jason Bourne” star admitted that he was “kind of bewildered” by the portrayal, which painted the actor as a moron who’s barely able to utter his own name.
“I was always kind of bewildered by ‘America,’ I think because it’s hard for us to understand what our images are in public, I think we’re not good judges of that,” Damon wrote, after the topic was broached.
“When I saw myself on screen just only able to say my own name and not really that well, I kind of wondered, ‘Wow, is that how people perceive me?’ At that point I just kind of was like, ‘I’m a screenwriter and an actor, and like really? I can barely say my own name?’”
Damon doesn’t appear to have any hard feelings about the slam, though. He went on to characterize Parker and Stone as “geniuses, and I don’t use that word lightly. I think they are absolute geniuses, and what they’ve done is awesome and I’m a big fan of theirs, but I never quite understood that one.”
Along with Damon, “Team America” lampooned a host of other celebrities, including Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon — all of whom wind up aligning themselves with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il in the film.
Damon figures that he and his colleagues were targeted for ridicule because of their anti-war stance — and as he sees it, he ultimately got the last laugh, or at least “told you so” bragging rights.
“Those of us who were parodied in that video were parodied because we were against the Iraq war, and we went on the record against that war, and so history is on my side not theirs,” Damon said.