Devyn Dalton, the 34-year-old Canadian stunt performer, says her phone started blowing up at 4 in the morning after Matt Damon singled her out on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. The attention came from a forced-perspective scene in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, where Dalton doubled Damon in a setup built to make performers look like giants.
Happy Sad Confused
Matt Damon said, “My double was a woman, a female stunt performer who had the greatest arms I've ever seen.” He also said, “When we did the force perspective stuff with the Laestrygonians… there were these stuntmen who were all 7 feet, and then they got stunt men who were under 5 feet.” That detail put Dalton’s work in public view even though the scene depended on a tight technical match between body size, camera placement, and stunt timing.
Christopher Nolan’s preference for practical effects over CGI shaped that setup, and the Laestrygonians sequence leaned on performers at opposite ends of the height range to sell the illusion. In practice, that means Dalton’s 4-foot-6 frame was not incidental; it was part of the optical math that let the film build scale without computer-generated substitution. Matt Damon Says Devyn Dalton Carried The Odyssey Stunt Double Work
Vancouver and British Columbia
Dalton grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, and started dancing when she was young before moving into theater. Around age 9, she found a newspaper clipping advertising a talent search and auditioned, then began working as a child actor in commercials and small television roles after signing with an agent.
After high school, Dalton booked work on the Planet of the Apes films and was introduced to motion capture, then later trained in martial arts and fight choreography. That path explains why the spotlight landed on her now: most people only learned about Dalton because of her arms, not because of the decades of work that came before them. On the podcast, Damon described the woman next to him in a major film; the audience suddenly met a veteran stunt performer with a long technical résumé.
Dalton said, “I want to show up and impress Matt Damon with my arms.” She added, “The response has been so positive, and I think people genuinely love seeing a strong woman celebrated for being strong.”
In the Yahoo interview, Dalton also said the attention has been “incredibly humbling,” but the practical takeaway is simpler: a performer who was built for precision work is now getting public recognition for the exact physical specialty that made the scene work. The only unanswered part is how she was chosen for the role in the first place, and that missing piece keeps the story on the craft rather than the celebrity.
