Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jodie Comer, and Adam Driver each provide an intense visage on several new character posters for director Ridley Scott’s upcoming historical drama The Last Duel, only in theaters October 15. With a core cast this stellar, it’s likely that The Last Duel will be hoping for some love come awards season, with these new posters teasing a harsh and heavy exploration of a very personal story set amid a grand historical background.
Jodie Comer, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Adam Driver star in Ridley Scott’s #TheLastDuel, only in theaters October 15. pic.twitter.com/mRnnggIGMK
— The Last Duel (@TheLastDuelFilm) September 21, 2021
The Last Duel drops our A-list cast in 14th-century France, and begins when Marguerite de Thibouville, played by Jodie Comer, claims she has been raped by her husband’s best friend, Jacques Le Gris, played by Adam Driver. Her husband, knight Jean de Carrouges, portrayed by Matt Damon, challenges his friend and squire to trial by combat, which culminates in the last legally sanctioned duel in France’s history.
The posters clearly hint at the powerful performances to come, with Matt Damon in particular looking like we’ve never seen him before. Scarred, determined, and sporting a scraggly beard, the leading man will put his life on the line for the sake of his honor.
Based on the book of the same name by Eric Jager, and with a screenplay by Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon, The Last Duel looks like a triumphant return to the big screen for Ridley Scott, with the movie teasing the kind of epic, dramatic cinema that the celebrated filmmaker has become known for thanks to the likes of Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven.
The movie also sees Matt Damon and Ben Affleck unite their writing skills once again after all these years. The pair first collaborated their talents on the critically acclaimed drama Good Will Hunting, which went on to earn them the Academy Award for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. “It’s the first movie we’ve written in 25 years or something, and we wrote with another great writer named Nicole Holofcener,” Matt Damon said of working alongside his long-time friend Ben Affleck after all this time. “We saw it as a story of perspective, and so Ben and I wrote the male perspectives and Nicole wrote the female perspective.”
Matt Damon has even teased more writing team-ups for him and Ben Affleck in the future following their work on The Last Duel saying that the duo plan to “write a lot more in the future. I think we just found that having made… like making movies for 30 years, we actually learned something about structure along the way and the process went along a lot faster,” he said. “And so I think we’ll write a lot more in the future just because it didn’t turn out to be as time-consuming as we thought. I think that writing process for Good Will Hunting was so inefficient,” Damon explained. “You know, because we didn’t really understand structure so we wrote thousands of pages.”
The Last Duel is due to have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 10, 2021 and is scheduled to be released in the United States on October 15, 2021, by 20th Century Studios.