Matt Damon has been nominated for five Academy Awards, and won one Oscar for Best Original Screenplay with his good friend, Ben Affleck, for Good Will Hunting. That said, not everybody is impressed with the talented (Mr. Ripley) Hollywood star. Matt Damon explains why his daughter won’t watch his best movies, and he talks about the savage way she makes fun of her famous father for some of his lesser liked roles.
But first, some context. Matt Damon is the father of four daughters. They have a really good relationship and Matt Damon makes sure that he remains close with them because he saw that some of his friends at Harvard didn’t have great home lives. This put them in a lot of emotional pain. So, he carried that knowledge with him into fatherhood when he had his own children. Well, out of his four daughters, his 15-year-old makes sure that he stays grounded. In a recent interview with CBS Sunday Morning, he had this to say:
My 15-year-old refuses to see [Good Will Hunting]. She doesn't want to see any movies that I'm in that she thinks might be good. She just likes to give me shit. My daughter said, 'Remember that movie you did, The Wall?' I said, 'It was called The Great Wall. She goes, 'Dad, there's nothing great about that movie.' She keeps my feet firmly on the ground.
I find this really hilarious because it sounds so much like my own family. I’m always ribbing my dad who is in Mensa. Whenever he says something that I think sounds boastful, I always have to throw in a little dig. He even waits for it sometimes, often saying, “What? No comeback?” whenever he makes some braggadocious comment about himself.
Along with a story I can personally relate to, it's also funny that Matt Damon’s daughter is making fun of The Great Wall, which dealt with a bit of controversy when it first came out. The American and Chinese co-production was a sci-fi action monster movie where Matt Damon helped fight off aliens. It was a box office bomb and the kind of film that family members can and should use to knock their famous fathers down a peg.
We still don’t know if Matt Damon’s daughter will want to watch his latest movie, Stillwater, though, which comes out on July 30th. It’s the story of an American oil rig man who travels to France to see his daughter who has been convicted of murder. It sounds really interesting, and Matt Damon really wanted to do it. That’s why he had a family meeting to discuss whether he could take on the role or not. In the same interview, he had this to say:
We kind of had a family meeting about it and my kids let me do the movie. I really wanted to do it. I’ve been dying to work with Tom McCarthy, the director, and I just thought it was such a beautiful story, and such a great role.
He goes on to say that he has a two-week rule in his household where he can’t be away from his family for more than two weeks at a time. He then goes on to say that Stillwater was the first movie where he had to break that rule, which he thinks helped him with his performance because he was really missing his kids.
It’s really cool that Matt Damon is such a devoted family man, and also that he can take a little needling from his kids. And what do you think of that two-week rule that he has with his family? Do you think that more celebrities should try to make that work? Let us know in the poll below!
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