‘No Sudden Move’ Ends With A Surprise Cameo From a Steven Soderbergh Favorite

Warning: This article contains major No Sudden Move spoilers. Seriously, save this one to read until after you’ve seen the movie!

No Sudden Move—a new period crime drama from director Steven Soderbergh that opened in theaters and on HBO Max today—has a very impressive cast.  Don Cheadle and Benicio del Toro star as small-time criminals; David Harbour and Amy Seimetz star as the middle-class family who get caught up in their scheme; Ray Liotta, Brendan Fraser, and Bill Duke star as various mob bosses in the city; and Jon Hamm stars as the detective battling organized crime.

The point is, there is no shortage of talent in this sprawling tale of crime, greed, and betrayal. But there’s one more surprise A-lister who shows up at the very end: a cameo from none other than Soderbergh’s frequent collaborator, Matt Damon.

Damon’s appearance is more than a cameo, really. Here’s how it goes down: Curt Goynes (Cheadle) and Ronald Russo (del Toro) are low-level criminals in Detroit in 1955. After what they think will be a simple job goes horribly wrong, Curt and Ronald manage to weasel their way up to the top of a conspiracy chain involving the then-booming auto industry in search of a bigger payday. And who do they find at the very top? Matt Damon, who plays a corporate executive who is working for all four of the top auto industries.

As it turns out, the documents that our lead characters were after contained evidence on pollution-reducing exhaust technology, and GM, Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors were colluding to cover up that science. (Though the characters are completely fictional, this collusion was a real anti-trust case filed by the Department of Justice in 1969.)

Despite his substantial role, Damon is not credited in the No Sudden Move cast list. And, as anyone who has seen Interstellar (or Thor: Ragnarok) knows, it’s not the first time the actor has unexpectedly shown up in a film for a surprise role. In an interview with Decider, No Sudden Move screenwriter Ed Solomon said the idea to surprise audiences with a last-minute A-list addition was all Soderbergh.

“I was about three-quarters of the way through the script, and I showed it to Steven, just to make sure before I finished it up that we were lined up,” Solomon said. “He said, ‘My only note is, let’s do something toward the end where we bring in a character that we haven’t introduced—one of those tour-de-force arias who comes in and changes the entire landscape. And it’s like a seven-page monologue.’ I was like, ‘Well that’s not daunting at all!'”

The pressure was on, and Solomon said it took him about four weeks to write just Damon’s scene. “It was an opportunity to see the whole scope of the movie from an entirely different point of view—to realize just how far up the chain these two low-level criminals had gotten.”

He added that while he didn’t know Damon would be the one to play the part at the time of writing, “We knew it would be someone like him. We talked about a variety of different people, and I think there was some press saying someone else [fellow Ocean‘s star George Clooney, according to some reports] was going to be doing it for a little while.”

That name changed thanks to schedule restructuring due to filming during COVID-19, but Solomon said Damon knocked it out of the park from the very first rehearsal. “He showed up with it memorized, walked it through on rehearsal, and we all just, jaw-dropped, went, ‘OK, that was amazing.’ And Steven was like, ‘Well why the hell didn’t I shoot that?'”

Though Damon was only on set for two days, Solomon described filming that scene with Cheadle, del Toro, and Damon as one of the stand-out moments of production for him. “It was an incredible thing to watch,” he said. “Watching three pros like them—and then a director like Steven—put together a scene that is so difficult, with what appears to be grace and ease, is remarkable.”

Watch No Sudden Move on HBO Max