What Matt Damon Thinks About His Mean Team America: World Police Parody

Trey Parker's controversial 2004 puppet film "Team America: World Police" is a spoof of many things. Foremost, it's a satire of the George W. Bush administration, an administration that was all too eager to start wars all over the world, setting up the United States as, yes, the world's police. Just as much, though, "Team America" is a spoof of Michael Bay and his tendencies toward wonton destruction, jingoism, and military fetish. Indeed, Michael Bay is called out by name in the song "The End of an Act," wherein songwriter Parker wrote, "I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made 'Pearl Harbor.'"

"Team America" also aims to poke fun at the late North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, turning him into a cartoon villain like out of a James Bond movie, and the violence-ready members of Team America end the film facing off against him. Frustratingly, though, Parker's film also lampoons American celebrities who deign to have an opinion on world politics. Indeed, Team America is just as perturbed by Alec Baldwin (voiced by "Futurama" actor Maurice LaMarche) as they are by Kim Jong-Il. Baldwin leads a cadre of Hollywood activists — the Film Actors Guild, get it? — who leverage their fame to be heard on the political stage. The celebrities are depicted as being unilaterally stupid and cowardly. "Team America," while hilarious in its slapstick irreverence, is also frustrating because it doesn't seem to have a point of view of its own. It hates everything it sees. 

One celebrity who takes it on the chin particularly hard is Matt Damon (voiced by Parker). This version of Damon, one of the members of the Guild, is like a handsome, idiotic Pokémon, only able to grunt his own name. Why pick on Damon in particular? Who can say? 

Back in 2016, the real-life Damon conducted an AMA session on Reddit, which allowed a fan to ask him about the grunting Matt Damon from "Team America." Damon had indeed seen "Team America," but didn't have any answers. He was just as baffled as the rest of us.

When asked about "Team America," Damon admitted that he might be missing something. He knew that Parker and his co-writer Matt Stone were lampooning the notion of celebrity, goofing on the way the public views certain actors. Damon felt that it was possible he had a public persona that he simply didn't know about, writing: 

"I was always kind of bewildered by 'America.' I think because it's hard for us to understand what our images are in public, I think we're not good judges of that. When I saw myself on screen just only able to say my own name and not really that well, I kind of wondered, 'Wow, is that how people perceive me?' At that point I just kind of was like, 'I'm a screenwriter and an actor, and like really? I can barely say my own name?'"

He seemed a little miffed. He also hastened to add, however, that Matt Stone and Trey Parker are geniuses, a term he doesn't use lightly. He also noted, though, that he was on the right side of history. "Team America" equates Hollywood activists with dictators, and showed that actors and singers were, by the end of the film, parroting the same rhetoric as Kim Jong-Il. Damon continued: 

"I think they are absolute geniuses, and what they've done is awesome and I'm a big fan of theirs, but I never quite understood that one. [...] Those of us who were parodied in that video were parodied because we were against the Iraq war, and we went on the record against that war, and so history is on my side not theirs." 

Damon has always been open about his political views, usually loudly endorsing Democratic political candidates. He may have been baffled by his depiction in "Team America," but he remained stalwart.