Hit-Boy and Matt Damon as "The Nomad" for Get Blue Get Blue Over the course of his career Matt Damon has portrayed characters stranded on other planets (Interstellar, The Martian), super-spies (the Bourne trilogy), racing legends (Ford vs. Ferrari), and crooked cops (The Departed), and later this summer in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey he will play one of the most famous characters in literary history.
But first, he needs to try his hand at rapping.
Damon on Tuesday debuted an alter-ego, “The Nomad” (it’s “Damon” spelled backwards, get it?), who, in partnership with Grammy award-winning artist and producer Hit-Boy, alongside producer, songwriter and DC Teddy Walton, gives rap a try as part of the launch for Get Blue, a new initiative from water.org, founded by Damon and Gary White.
You can watch “The Nomad” at work here.
Get Blue is trying to end the global water crisis by partnering with major brands like Starbucks, Gap and Amazon to help get water to families who need it most by offering unique products which will help fund the campaign.
The Hollywood Reporter sat down with Damon and White Tuesday morning in Manhattan to discuss the initiative, Damon’s burgeoning and likely short-lived music career, and why young consumers seem excited to be returning to movie theaters, just in time for The Odyssey.
Matt, Gary, thanks for talking with me. Can you help me understand what the origin of Get Blue is, and how it connects to what you guys are doing with water.org?
Gary White: Richard Dickson [president and CEO of Gap] sat down with us about a year and a half ago, actually, and we kind of hashed this idea together. He was very passionate about making sure Gap has a really solid place inside of culture and the demographics that are important to them, and that just kind of started the wheels turning, and then we wanted to have something that would allow anybody to get engaged in different ways, and through the brands and their generosity, they’ve created all these different products that — just making a choice for the blue hoodie gets $5 to water.org and we turn that into safe water for people.
And then Starbucks came on board with the matchas [two coconut-flavored drinks], Ecolab, in terms of a business to business way, and Amazon through Amazon Music, they’ll have a playlist where, when you stream it, that generates a donation to water.org and you can tell Alexa to donate to water.org and they’ll donate on behalf of the person, so there are all these great ways to allow people to take action in very simple ways, and that’s key to it: What can you do in your everyday life that’s not a heavy lift, but you can still change somebody’s life halfway around the world.
Matt Damon: And $5 is, with our programming, what it takes to get somebody clean water for life, so with something like that, there’s a one to one relationship to what you’re buying and who you’re impacting.
I’ll ask about the music side in a second, but I did want to touch on the brands that you’re partnering with, because when I saw the list, Gap, Starbucks, Amazon, these are blue chip brands that, everyone knows and interacts with on a regular basis. What went into finding the right launch partners?
Damon: Richard really was was instrumental, and he convened all of these brands out in San Francisco, and did a working session with them all, and was just trying to troubleshoot ways to get people involved, and that’s how everybody kind of started. This is kind of the founding group of partners, and they took the lead in saying, all right, what are our strengths? What’s the best way for us to engage with this? So it’s not prescriptive at all, and we’re looking to attract more people to bring them on, and use this as an example of how these these companies are doing completely different things, but for an issue like this, which is really hard to get purchase in our culture, because it’s not really relatable for those of us who grew up here, and yet it’s this problem that affects one in four human beings on the planet. What’s wonderful about this is because of the size of the platforms of these companies, these access points are different, and so hopefully they’ll start appearing in people’s lives in different ways, and it’ll hopefully raise it in the collective consciousness.
White: I think we chose them and they chose us, right? So what’s really interesting is that each of these partners had been working with us at water.org for a while, so they vetted us, they vetted our solution, and what we’re doing, and they felt really good. Even before this campaign, this group of partners has helped us reach millions of people with access to water, they’re donating millions of dollars already, even before we started this, so there was already a natural affiliation that, if we get into this campaign with you, it’s really going to work. People are really going to get water, and we can back that up.
On the music front, the two things I wanted to touch on are using music to engage people through culture, and then The Nomad, which I’ll ask about in a second. But on the first front, music is a gateway to a lot of things for people, it’s a part of people’s everyday lives.
Damon: As is humor.
Yes, true. So, on the cultural front, how did you decide to integrate music into the larger campaign? And Where did this Nomad idea came from? How was it for you to rap?
Damon: Well, you know, awkward, but I think that was the point. Music and humor are two of the best ways to cut through in culture, and so obviously, those are two places that we’re, that we’re trying to focus on. The Nomad thing was just a silly idea that we all agreed was silly enough that it might actually work and might get a little attention, and it’s all about just again trying to find these different access points for people to just understand that this is a problem.
When I went on my first trip abroad — it was a curated trip to learn about extreme poverty — and this is 20 years ago, that was when I was introduced to this issue, and I really didn’t know anything about it, and and I was amazed at how water undergirded just about every other aspect of extreme poverty, like we were at the UNGA last year, and they had the sustainable development goals, like all 17 of them up on the wall at the Goals House, and we were looking through them and water was connected to every single one of these, so that was kind of my “aha moment,” and that’s what led me into this.
If you’re raising money for AIDS research or cancer research, there’s usually a family member or a friend or somebody who you’re directly connected to who’s affected by this, if not you yourself. It’s not that way with water, and so that’s been kind of a struggle for us, an ongoing one that’s been front of mind for us for since we started. How do we connect at the grassroots level with people? Because once people know about it, they really want to help. Once people realize a million kids are dying every year from things that are totally preventable, they say, “well, what can I do?” And so this is an attempt at an answer to that.
One of the things that I think you have to do if you’re trying to draw attention to a cause like this is reach people where they are in the ways that that make sense to them, and I think music is a good way to do that. I’m just curious, how you’ve thought about that throughout the water.org campaign and with Get Blue, in terms of trying to find ways to kind of create something that gets people talking, that’ll catch people’s attention at a time, frankly, when you know we’ve got more things to watch and listen to than ever before.
Damon: We thought it was hard 17 years ago, it’s only become harder, and I wish we had a better answer for that. You know, we tried all sorts of things. I mean, we go to these conferences, we speak on these panels, we’ve done I don’t know how many hours on CNBC, we gain some traction, but the larger traction that you’re talking about has been elusive, and that’s why we’re hoping this can be something big for us.
[Damon will also do a TikTok live, which started after they approached water.org at Davos] They came to us at Davos, and they’ve been wonderful, it’s another one of these massive companies going, okay, we know what we do well, and let’s see how we can work with you and help maximize the impact. There’s a knock on effect anytime these big blue chip brands are involved, there’s a signal effect to everybody else to say “oh this is something that we that we need to engage with and be a part of.”
White: We are entrepreneurial, we’re innovative, you know, that’s why what we do in terms of getting water into the world works, and it works in a big way, and this is our shot, right? We’re going to go out and give it a try. Having partners like Gap, I mean, Gap, when it was founded, it was selling tapes and records, and so that’s in their DNA. So, being able to partner with them, to be able to partner with with Amazon Music, we like to surround ourselves with people that are smarter than ourselves, and so it’s great to have these partners to lean on to help us figure that out.
Music has always been a touchstone, we know that, you go back to the ’60s and that was the forefront of what was changing and shaping the world, even a generation ahead, “We Are The World,” it seems a little kitschy now, but that was so powerful to activate so many people, so by partnering with these partners, we hope that we can break through and give people an open door to not just buy the product, but then use that door to say, what is this water issue, and how can we be a part of the solution? Even if you can’t afford $5, sharing with your network when you hear this or read about it, donating when you can, but then choosing, you know, a Get Blue product that you got to buy something anyway.
Related to that, Matt, you are in a movie coming out this summer that I’m sure is going to get a lot of attention, The Odyssey, and I think it’ll also draw attention to the cause that you have here with both water.org and Get Blue. There’s a lot of excitement and anticipation for the film, and I’m kind of curious to get your thoughts on what you think that anticipation says about people’s excitement to go see a unique movie with an artistic vision from a director. The movie business seems to be having its best box office in years, we’ve had some films in the past couple months that have visionary directors that kind of came out of nowhere, and they reminded me, in some ways, of [Christopher Nolan’s] Memento.
Damon: It’s really exciting, I think. Also, this last year, looking at Sinners and One Battle After Another and Bugonia and all these movies, it feels like we’re finally coming out of that COVID era, and certainly — I see it with my own kids and with their friends — there there seems to be this real desire to go back to the theaters.
And listen Chris’s work weathers everything, he’s a very special director and there’s a lot of anticipation for what he’s doing, but this movie’s coming at a really good time, where it feels like everybody’s wanting to go back and enjoying going back the way that Ben and I went to the movies every weekend when we were growing up, and if a movie was sold out, we just went to whatever else was playing, it was just part of our lives, and it feels like that’s coming back for this next generation, and that’s really exciting.
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