There’s no doubt Aaron Eckhart’s performance as the hot-shot Gotham district attorney was terrific. He was Gotham’s beacon of hope and lived a believable character arc that led him to leave behind his good-guy reputation to adopt his supervillain persona. The character defined the line between good and evil, and it would’ve been something to see Matt Damon’s interpretation of it. Unfortunately, the actor had scheduling conflicts with a big project he was headlining and couldn’t take up the role.
In an interview with The Playlist, Damon revisited the story:
“Well, ‘Dark Knight’ was a small role that I was offered … It wasn’t Heath or Christian’s part … There was some other big movie, some big part that I was doing where I was like, ‘Well, I can’t play Harvey Dent, this is a relatively small role, but I am headlining this other thing.’ But you gotta be sanguine about it and go, ‘It all works out.’ At this point, I passed on the biggest payday in the history [of cinema] accidentally, so I could never do worse financially, I could never commit a worse financial error.”
