McCain’s choice to play him as prisoner of war: Matt Damon
President Donald Trump may have disparaged John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War, but the late senator’s military service and the more than five years he spent as a prisoner of war is the stuff of legend and heroism.
It’s for this reason that McCain knew his POW story would make a good movie, according to Page Six columnist Cindy Adams. He also revealed to Adams in 2008 the A-list star he thought could play him.
“We talked of the heroic years he has known, and the someday experience he might know,” Adams recalled. That’s when she said McCain told her: “I would like Matt Damon to play me as a prisoner of war.”
In 2008, Damon was in his late 30s, though not much older than McCain was when he was captured, at age 31, after the U.S. Navy lieutenant’s fighter plane was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967. McCain’s story would certainly make for a harrowing saga, and it’s easy to imagine an actor seeing the Academy Award possibilities of playing a role that depicts both profound suffering and almost superhuman fortitude.
One of McCain’s legs and both his arms were broken during his ejection from his Skyhawk fighter plane. His captors also refused to give him treatment until they learned he was the son of a Navy admiral. Perhaps McCain’s most notable act came less than a year into his captivity. After his father, John McCain Sr., was named commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, the North Vietnamese offered to release the admiral’s son.
But McCain refused, according to Business Insider, recalling later that “Every prisoner the Vietnamese tried to break, those who had arrived before me and those who would come after me, would be taunted with the story of how an admiral’s son had gone home early, a lucky beneficiary of America’s classconscious society.”
Of course, if the movie were developed now, Damon, nearing 50, would be too old.