Matt Damon and his wife had a “Chris Nolan caveat” in their agreement for him to take time off

If you’ve ever been to a sleepover or had a giggly night staying up late and talking with your partner or spouse, you may have indulged in a fun little American pastime and come up with a “celebrity hall pass.” The thing about hall passes is no one ever actually expects that person to just drop into their lives and screw everything up/change their world—apparently not even celebrities themselves.

While Matt Damon and his wife Luciana didn’t establish a pass in the, er, traditional sense, they apparently had an iron-clad agreement locked in for when it came to directors: Christopher Nolan. We can all guess what happened next.

“This is gonna sound made up, but it’s actually true,” Damon said in a recent Entertainment Weekly “Around The Table” conversation with Nolan and fellow Oppenheimer costars Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, and Robert Downey Jr. “I had—not to get too personal—negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off.” In just the past two years, Damon has starred in Air (which he also produced), The Last Duel, and Stillwater, as well as made cameo appearances in Thor: Love And Thunder and No Sudden Move.

He continued:

I had been in Interstellar, and then Chris put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation, but I actually negotiated in couples therapy—this is a true story—the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called. This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you… He just calls you out of the blue. It was a moment in my household.

Damon is lucky he had the “foresight,” as he said, to lock in this exemption, or else Nolan might have become the destroyer of marriages (sorry). Robert Downey Jr. perhaps summed it up best, saying: “So even modern psychology has a caveat for Chris? You heard it here first.”