Matt Damon promised wife he would take acting break before receiving Oppenheimer call

Matt Damon promised his wife Luciana Barroso he would take a break from acting – but then he was offered a role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

During an interview with his Oppenheimer co-stars for Entertainment Weekly, The Bourne Identity actor revealed he told his wife in a couples therapy session that he would take a break from acting unless Nolan called.

“This is going to sound made up, but it’s actually true,” Damon said during EW’s Around the Table series. “I had – not to get too personal – negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off. I had been in Interstellar, and then Chris put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation, but I actually negotiated in couples therapy – ­ this is a true story – the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called.

“This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you. He just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household.”

Damon, who played Mann in Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi Interstellar, plays General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the Manhattan Project, in Oppenheimer alongside Cillian Murphy as the “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer.

He also has multiple movies in the pipeline including Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls, Doug Liman’s The Instigators, and John Krasinski’s IF.