Matt Damon has reflected on how a long, high-profile Hollywood career has shaped him as a dad.
The 55-year-old actor shares three daughters with wife Luciana Bozán Barroso: Isabella, 19, Gia, 17, and Stella, 15. He’s also a stepfather to Luciana’s daughter Alexia, 26, from a previous marriage.
Although Damon has been working in the industry since he was 18, he admitted that the unpredictability of acting work can spill over into family life.
“There’s less of that kind of young person’s engine of needing to prove something and more about, like, accepting work and doing it on your terms and doing it as precisely and as well as you can. I think about it a lot, especially as my kids are getting older, really trying to be here now,” he said during a new interview with GQ.
He went on to say that staying grounded in the present hasn’t always come easily, pointing to both his personality and the realities of the job.
“It also has to do with this career where you’re always trying to figure out what’s ahead, because it’s such an uncertain business and a pretty ruthless one,” he said. “Those kinds of things have conspired to, I think, maybe take me out of where I am, more than I’d like.”
Damon began picking up roles in the 1980s, including an early appearance in Mystic Pizza, but his major turning point arrived in 1997 when he played Will Hunting in Good Will Hunting opposite Ben Affleck.
Looking back on that era in the same GQ interview, the The Odyssey star said he ‘worked straight for five years’—and enjoyed the pace at the time.
Affleck has previously shared that despite the film’s success, the money didn’t last long once the checks came in.
The pair, who were living together at the time, split $600,000—only to burn through it quickly.
During an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in 2023, the Gone Girl actor broke down how it happened, saying they bought pricey vehicles and soon realized the payout wasn’t as massive as it initially sounded after fees and taxes.
“We sold it [Good Will Hunting] for $600,000, we split that, $300,000 each, and then the agents got $30,000 so we had $270,000 and we paid about $160,000 in taxes so we had $110,000, each bought $55,000 Jeep Cherokees and then had $55,000 left,” Affleck told Barrymore.
“Naturally we decided to rent a $5,000 a month party house on Glencoe Way by the Hollywood Bowl and we were broke in six months.”
Hopefully they have accountants now!