Elysium star Matt Damon said he literally ate human excrement while filming a scene for director Neill Blomkamp’s new sci-fi flick.
In order to make the film’s dystopian world seem brutally authentic, the director sent his cast and crew to one of the world’s largest garbage dumps near Mexico City. It was there that the actor suddenly found himself with a mouth full of poop.
During his chat with the folks at Metro, Matt Damon recounted this unsavory experience on the set of Elysium. While filming the scene in the dump, the star revealed that a helicopter kept blowing excrement all over the place.
“We had one location in the dump that was called Poo River. It was like: ‘OK, can we get everybody down to Poo River for Scene 36,’” the actor told the website.
He continued, “He kept coming in too low and was blowing Poo River all over us. We literally ate sh*t. We were covered in it. It was tough; we were all told to get rid of the clothes that we wore each day. There was enough fecal matter to get sick and that was the big fear — that we might get respiratory illness from just breathing it in.”
Anyone who said an actor’s life is charmed obviously hasn’t spent very much time on a Neill Blomkamp movie. Apparently the director isn’t above flinging copious amounts of crap all over his cast in order to get the shots he’s after.
Elysium casts Matt Damon in the role of a terminally-ill man who decides to infiltrate a state-of-the-art space station in order to save his own skin. Along the way, our hero will have to contend with a very unpleasant woman named Delacourt (Jodie Foster) and her villainous henchman (Sharlto Copley).
Are you planning to catch Elysium in theaters? What do you think about Matt Damon eating quite a bit of human excrement while shooting his latest movie?
[Image via TriStar Pictures / Sony Pictures]