On Easter Sunday, while on her afternoon stroll, Irish novelist Denise Deegan realized she still had not yet called her mother. “Hello” she said cheerily into her phone. “Hello,” a man on the street replied.
Looking at the man’s face, she realized the voice belonged to actor Matt Damon.
Living through a pandemic already had her feeling as if she were in a movie, “and then you look up and Matt Damon’s there,” she said in an interview.
Sightings of Damon have become common over the past couple of months in Dalkey, a seaside resort southeast of Dublin, where his presence has added yet another surreal layer to life under lockdown.
It’s not just that one of the world’s biggest stars and his family must stay within 2 kilometers (about 1.2 miles) of home, like the rest of them. It’s that an actor who played a father trying to protect his family amid a sprawling pandemic in the movie “Contagion” is now living through an eerily similar reality alongside them.
The scenario also has Dalkey residents rallying against a new common enemy: outsiders who ask too many questions about their Matt O’Damon, as some now call him.
If you were going to be stuck somewhere, it’s not difficult for residents to understand why their village of 8,000, about 9 miles southeast of Dublin, would be a smart choice. “You could say that Dalkey would be where people would aspire to live in if they won the lottery!” said one resident, Noreen Farrar.
The Damon sightings in Dalkey and neighboring Killiney, which together are sometimes referred to as “Ireland’s Amalfi Coast,” began in mid-March. According to an assistant to Damon’s agent, this was when he arrived in the area to shoot scenes for “The Last Duel,” a soon-to-be-suspended medieval drama directed by Ridley Scott. It was also not long before the pubs closed and police began checking if people were straying beyond their permitted 2 kilometers.
(Excerpt) Read more @ boston.com