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“There’s a great lesson here for an actor,’ Matt Damon said, a dusting of gray in his short hair and thin goatee, fine age lines around his pale blue eyes. It was early May, and he was speaking via Zoom from a sparsely appointed, sun-splashed room in a rented house in Sydney, Australia, telling a story about working with Jack Nicholson on Martin Scorsese’s 2006 dirty-cops-and-criminals epic, “The Departed.” “The scene was an eighth of a page,” Damon said, arching his eyebrows devilishly and adopting Jack’s insinuating vocal tones. He was recalling the older actor’s talking about reworking a scene in which his character, the Boston gangster Frank Costello, is supposed to murder a man in a marsh. “Jack looked at that scene” — and, truly, it was almost startling how well Damon captured Nicholson’s disquieting energy — “and he goes: ‘What I did was I made the person being executed a woman. That’s sinister. Costello executes a guy in a marsh? We’ve seen that kind of scene in movies before. That’s not what I did.’”

Damon smiled, showing his big, bright teeth (his physical feature that is most undeniably a star’s), as he described Nicholson’s filigrees becoming increasingly macabre, adding, for example, intimations of necrophilia and then punctuating each with “Now, that’s sinister” to make sure his young co-star caught his drift. “I was like, ‘Yep, it is, it’s pretty awful,”’ Damon said, his voice cracking as he relived his squeamishness. Scorsese wound up cutting almost all of Nicholson’s jazz. But that’s not the lesson. The lesson, Damon explained — dressed on this day, as he was each time we talked over several weeks this spring, in a pale shirt and wearing a tatty string bracelet that one of his daughters had woven for him — “was that Jack started with something we’ve seen plenty of times and kept trying to make it as good and as interesting as it could possibly be.”

Damon has learned that lesson well, though he expresses it in a very different way from Nicholson, who no matter the part always conveys an innate Jackness. Instead, Damon the man can almost disappear. As both a performer and a public figure, he’s a type we’ve seen plenty of times: the regular guy, an All-American, the nice fella who could live next door. But there is also an underrecognized Nicholsonian edge, a darkness, to many of his roles, which perhaps bespeaks the relish with which he offered his impression. All of which is to say that in ways both subtle and not, intentional and un-, he has complicated his relationship with audiences, elaborated and often inverted the idea of Matt Damon.

Over the course of his long tenure near the top of the Hollywood food chain, Damon has often embodied idealized Everymen: the solid, approachable, well-meaning, scrappy characters he has played with seeming simplicity and emotional economy in a long line of very successful movies. There’s the stolid rugby captain Francois Pienaar in “Invictus” (2009); the keeping-it-together dad in the 2011 pandemic procedural “Contagion”; the good ol’ boy auto racing impresario Carroll Shelby, up against them fancy Italians, in “Ford v Ferrari” (2019). Think, too, of his Mark Watney from “The Martian” (2015), an astronaut not about to let being marooned on Mars dampen his geeky enthusiasm for solving lifesaving science problems. Even amid the glamorous milieu of the “Ocean’s” series of heist films, Damon’s pickpocket Linus Caldwell is eager for the approval of George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s suave superthieves, which means he’s more like you or me than he is like them.