Matt Dillon

I wasn’t a crazy super fan of Matt Dillon as a kid, but I did like the movies he was in. I’m proud of the actor he has become. I’ve been there from the beginning and feel I kind of have the right to be proud of him. He started out as a teen idol and kind of a pretty boy. I remember seeing him on a talk show and he came off as not very intelligent. But he looked good with his shirt off, so there’s that.

Matt Dillon was born in New York on February 18, 1964. Talent scouts discovered him while he was cutting math class in middle school. I LOVE math! I would have never cut math class. It was history class that I liked to cut. It’s stupid. Who cares. It already happened. Anyway, the scouts found Matt in a corridor at school and approached him. He was a dick to them but ended up being cast in the movie Over the Edge. The moral of the story kids is “Be a dick and come out on top”.

Matt Dillon Trivia

• He is older brother to Kevin Dillon. I loved him on Entourage.
• He dated Cameron Diaz for three years.
• He was the original choice for Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction. That role went to Bruce Willis.
• He was the original choice for Richard in The Blue Lagoon but turned it down because of the nudity. That role went to Chris Atkins.
• He has a big CD collection and an even bigger vinyl collection.
• He went to the audition for Over the Edge not because he wanted the role, but because he wanted to miss school.
• Francis Ford Coppola told Matt to go home after he auditioned for the part of Dally in The Outsiders. He assumed he didn’t get the part. Turns out that he was sent home because Coppola already knew he would cast him as Dally.
• His character in both The Outsiders and Over the Edge was gunned down by police after he pointed an unloaded gun at them.
• He was arrested in late 2008 for driving 106 mph. Cool.
• He’s really into jazz and Latin music. Very cool.
• He never finished high school. He dropped out when he was a junior.
• Even though his character in Over the Edge had died, Matt Dillon is in the scene where the kids fire guns and light fires and smash cars and stuff. Matt was sad that he couldn’t smash things so the director dressed him up so you couldn’t see his face and then let him in the scene.
• He is left handed.

Jazzy Matt

Doing research for this blog has given me newfound respect for Matt Dillon. I love the fact that he’s into jazz. I read an interview where he mentioned Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown. Most people don’t know anything about these jazz trumpeters. (Clifford Brown is one of my heroes.)

Matt realizes that he has some holes in his education due to the fact that he dropped out of high school (and wasn’t a great student when he did go to school). I think he’s like me in that he reads and learns about things that he’s interested in. He may not be educated in the conventional way, but he is an educated man.

Matt Dillon is one of the few teen idols from my era who is still going strong. Leif Garrett is addicted to heroin. Scott Baio is on Twitter pissing people off. Corey Haim is dead. Ralph Macchio tried to be a dancer. Like I said earlier, I’m very proud of the actor that Matt Dillon has become…and he’s way cool because he’s into Clifford Brown.