Recently, reports have surfaced that Matt Damon is appearing at Taika Waititi’s Thor: love and thunder– reports that apparently have been confirmed by Damon’s arrival in Australia to shoot an “important film”. We don’t know who Damon may be playing at Love and thunder, but this will not be his first appearance in the Thor series of films. He had an uncredited cameo in Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok as an actor playing Loki in a self-aggrandizement piece that Loki himself wrote, but with him possibly returning in the next film, we have to ask: Matt Damon was playing himself Ragnarok? And if so, he’ll be playing himself in Love and thunder too?
Let’s look at the facts:
- Matt Damon on Ragnarok is an actor, and Matt Damon in real life is also an actor.
- Matt Damon on Ragnarok he looks like Matt Damon and (although he’s acting) he also talks like Matt Damon, while Matt Damon in real life also looks and talks like Matt Damon.
- Matt Damon on Ragnarok does not have a name, which means that your name can be anything (including, say, Matt Damon).
Now let’s look at the arguments against this Matt Damon being the real Matt Damon:
- Matt Damon on Ragnarok is in Asgard, while the real Matt Damon lives mostly on Earth.
- Matt Damon in Ragnarok played Loki, while the actor who plays Loki in real life is Tom Hiddleston.
- Actors are not necessarily representing themselves when playing unnamed characters, and it is silly to think otherwise.
Given that information, we can safely say that, yes, Matt Damon was playing himself in Thor: Ragnarok. But what about Love and thunder? Well, most of the people in Asgard are dead, whether from the events of Ragnarok or Thanos’s violence at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War. Also, we don’t know how the real Matt Damon got to Asgard in the first place, so we don’t know if he could have escaped before everyone was killed, but it seems unlikely that a normal human without special powers would survive when so many Asgardians didn’t … so let’s say that Matt Damon is probably not playing himself Love and thunder because Matt Damon’s version of Marvel Cinematic Universe is probably dead.