Chattiness has never been necessary for CIA assassins on the lam. Even so, it is surprising to learn that Matt Damon only has about 25 lines of dialogue in Jason Bourne, the upcoming installment of the spy franchise in which the movie star plays, well, Jason Bourne. Even more surprising, however: what this means about Damon’s paycheck.

Back in 2007, Forbes reported that Damon was paid $26 million for The Bourne Ultimatum—“a bargain for Universal” given that the film went on to gross over $290 million worldwide. Damon chose not to star in the franchise’s fourth film—2012’s The Bourne Supremacy, which neared The Bourne Ultimatum’s international box-office gross. But without Damon as its star or previous franchise director Paul Greengrass at the helm, The Bourne Supremacy garnered mixed reviews—a disappointment for the critics who buoyed The Bourne Ultimatum’s Rotten Tomatoes score to an impressive 93 percent. Damon was reportedly paid $25 million to star in 2015’s The Martian. And if that paycheck is any indication for what Universal had to shell out to woo Damon back to the franchise that has grossed over $1.2 billion worldwide, he was likely paid at least $25 million for Jason Bourne. If that were the case, the actor made about $1 million per line of dialogue.

Damon and Greengrass dropped the dialogue details in an interview with The Guardian, during which they offered a frank explanation for why the spy speaks so little.

“The thing about making these films,” Greengrass explains, “is that they’re not like a normal film. With a franchise movie, it’s got to turn the wheels of the industry and the studio has to have them. So you start with a release date. They say we’re going to make a new Bourne film and it comes out summer of X. Then they start on a script and invariably the script is not ready in time.”

Rather than start filming without a script, Greengrass says that he and his fellow screenwriter Christopher Rouse hurried the scripting process—and dialogue, as is the case for most action films, was not exactly a priority. The low line count did not bother Damon, however, who enjoys the challenge of expressive acting.

“Well, I’ve done it three times,” Damon says of the minimal-talking Bourne movies. “In the first movie, the Marie Kreutz character [Bourne’s girlfriend, played by Franka Potente) is still alive, so Bourne has a sounding board and he’s more confused about who he is and a lot more chatty. Once she dies in the first act of the second movie, it’s really a very lonely character. And we talked about that mostly on the second one. I remember Tony writing me an email saying, ‘You do realize what this means? You do realize you’re not going to talk in this movie.’ I said, ‘No, I love that.’”

The Bourne movies have never been about dialogue, points out Greengrass. “I think what makes a Bourne movie is the violence and the set pieces,” he tells The Guardian, “but there’s a tremendous amount of emotionality in the character.”

With only 25 lines in the movie, viewers who have seen the movie's trailer are already aware of over a fourth of the film's dialogue. Among Bourne’s lines:

“I know who I am.”

“I remember. I remember everything.”

“Tell me.”

“They tracked you. We gotta move.”

“I volunteered. Because of a lie.”

“This is Jason Bourne. I need to talk.”

Of course the actor did have to flex other (literal) muscles to earn the paycheck, and said that he trained harder than he had for any of the previous Bourne films to execute the action sequences.

“I trained a lot more than I ever had done before because Paul Greengrass said that when we see Bourne in the first frame of the movie and it looks like he hasn't been living well, then we don't have a movie,” Damon told The Telegraph. “So he really wanted me to be physically fit and lean so it was a lot of work for me to get there.”

Jason Bourne opens in theaters July 29.