Matt Damon is grateful he hasn’t faced the same media glare as his best friend Ben Affleck throughout the pair’s twenty-plus years in Hollywood.
“I’ve been really lucky in that way,” Damon, 53, said in an interview he and Affleck’s brother Casey, 49, did with the Radio Times Podcast on August 6 to promote their movie, “The Instigators.”
“Especially when I look at Casey’s brother, Ben. I can’t imagine living under that kind of scrutiny,” Damon continued. “And it’s been like that for 25 years. And we’ve had parallel careers in a lot of ways, and, so I’m fortunate to have been kind of excused from that part of [it].”
“That magazine culture that was so huge you know,” Damon added, referring to the beginning of his and Affleck’s careers, which took off after they won Oscars at the 1998 Academy Awards for their “Good Will Hunting” screenplay.
“Twenty-five years ago, [the magazines] kind of ignored me,” he went on. Hazarding a guess as to why he avoided a certain kind of attention, he suggested, “A guy who’s married, it’s so boring.”
Damon met his wife Luciana in 2003 while she was working at a bar. They married in 2005 and share three daughters, Isabella, Gia and Stella. Matt is also a stepdad to Luciana’s daughter from a previous relationship, Alexia.
“What would sell those things were scandal and sex and all that stuff,” Damon said of celebrity magazines at that time.
“And as long as you didn’t do any of that stuff it wasn’t really worth their time to wait to take your picture and so I ended up kind of getting left alone.”
Nonetheless, Damon was still confronted with an overwhelming amount of fame when he became a movie star. The experience left him with a “bizarre, disorienting feeling.” To cope and distract himself, he turned to work.
“I just wanted to get to work and so I kind of hid for a few years while I got my bearings,” Damon recalled of that era of his life.
“Luckily [I] fell in love with someone who was not in the business, who would tolerate that side of it, and that really helped me,” he said of Luciana.
While Damon has presented the image of a serene and happy family as of late – his wife and daughters were by his side at the New York premiere of “The Instigators” in July – Affleck’s marriage drama has played out in the public.
The “Argo” director, 51, and wife Jennifer Lopez, 55, are widely rumored to be headed toward divorce. They spent the summer apart, with each opting to be away from the other for their second wedding anniversary.
On Sunday, August 12, the “Jenny From the Block” singer was spotted at Affleck’s rental home in the Brentwood neighborhood of LA after spending a day with his and ex-wife Jennifer Garner’s son, Samuel.
Lopez stayed at the actor’s house for nearly five hours. Affleck has been staying at the rental since May as they put the LA mansion they purchased in July of 2023 on the market.
In July, Affleck bought a bachelor pad for over $20 million. Lopez, meanwhile, is shopping for her own home, reportedly for life after Bennifer 2.0.
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