Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Jodie Comer Have a Medieval Showdown in The Last Duel Trailer
Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Jodie Comer are at the center of one of the last medieval duels in history in their new film.
The first trailer for The Last Duel follows Comer’s Marguerite de Carrouges in the aftermath of her assault at the hands of Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver).
Marguerite refuses to stay silent, and while he denies the charge against him, he is challenged to a duel by Jean de Carrouges (Damon), Marguerite’s husband and Le Gris’ former friend.
The battle, overseen by Count Pierre d’Alençon (Affleck), is based on the actual events of France’s last sanctioned duel based on the book by Eric Jager, The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal and Trial by Combat in Medieval France.
Affleck, 48, and Damon, 50, teamed up in writing the script alongside Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said). This is their first writing collaboration since 1997’s Good Will Hunting, which earned them both an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and won Best Supporting Actor for Robin Williams.
“This film is an effort to retell the story of a heroic woman from history whom most people haven’t heard of.
We admired her bravery and resolute determination and felt this was both a story that needed to be told and one whose drama would captivate audiences the way it moved us as writers,” Affleck, Damon and Holofcener said in a statement about the film.
They continued, “As we further explored the story, we found so many aspects of the formal, codified patriarchy of 14th century Western Europe to still be present in vestigial ways (and in some cases almost unchanged) in today’s society.”
“We chose to use the device of telling the story from several character’s perspectives in order to examine the immutable fact that although often multiple people who experience the same event come away with differing accounts, there can only be one truth,” they added.
The film is directed by Ridley Scott (Prometheus), who said, “I love working with Matt, so it was an added bonus to be able to work with him and Ben as both actors and as screenwriters, along with Nicole Holofcener, and I knew it would be a great result.”
He also revealed his admiration for Comer, 28, stemming from her BBC series Killing Eve. “[I] had been looking for the opportunity to present Jodie Comer with a challenging role.
Her performance as Marguerite will make her one of the great actresses of her generation.”
Damon opened up about reuniting with Affleck while on Conan in November 2019 saying, “We wrote it with an amazing writer named Nicole Holofcener.
It’s about the last sanctioned duel in medieval France between these two knights, one of whom claimed the other raped his wife.”