Random Fascinating Things Most People Don't Know About Matt Damon (16 items)

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  (#1) Matt And Ben Are (Distantly) Related

  Matt Damon and fellow Boston native Ben Affleck are more than just childhood friends. According to the New England Genealogical Society, the Good Will Hunting Oscar winning screenwriters and co-stars are tenth cousins, once removed. Both are descended from William Knowlton Jr., a bricklayer who made his way to the United States from England in the 1630s.
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  (#2) He Broke Up With Minnie Driver During An Interview With Oprah

  Okay, so Matt Damon isn't perfect. He and Good Will Hunting love interest Minnie Driver began a real romance while the film was in production. When the picture received nine Academy Award nominations, Damon hit the awards circuit. On The Oprah Winfrey Show, he denied he had a girlfriend. This was a surprise to Driver, who thought they were still a couple.

  "It's horrendous breaking up with someone anyway, but to have it be so public and to be cast in a role that I would never play if they were paying me - this wronged woman," Driver stated during a 1998 interview with the Los Angeles Times.

  "It's unfortunate that Matt went on 'Oprah'; it seemed like a good forum for him to announce to the world that we were no longer together, which I found fantastically inappropriate. Of course, he was busy declaring his love for me on David Letterman a month previously."

  Damon, you dog. 
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  (#3) He Had To Take Medication For A Year And A Half After His Dramatic Weight Loss For Courage Under Fire

  Damon lost 40 pounds with extreme diet and exercise for the role of Specialist Ilario in Courage Under Fire (1996). His character, a solder experiencing the devastating after effects of war, becomes addicted to heroin. Damon's health suffered from the weight loss; he had to take medication for a year and a half to correct the stress he put on his adrenal gland. Despite the trauma, it was worth it in the end. Matt's commitment and method style of acting caught the eye of Francis Ford Coppola, who cast the actor in the lead role of his 1997 legal drama The Rainmaker.
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  (#4) His Brother Kyle Inspired One Of The Most Famous Scenes From Good Will Hunting

  Matt’s brother Kyle visited a physicist on the MIT campus one day. While walking down the school's Infinite Corridor, which is lined with blackboards, Kyle, an artist, picked up a piece of a chalk and wrote an elaborate, totally fake, equation.

  As Matt said in his 2016 commencement speech at MIT, no one erased the bogus equation for months. Kyle was so stunned by these blackboards, he told his brother, “you guys, listen to this... They’ve got blackboards running down the hall! Because these kids are so smart they just need to, you know, drop everything and solve problems!”
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  (#5) In His Own Words, He "Fake Graduated" From Harvard

  During Damon's 2016 commencement speech at MIT, Damon admitted he attended Harvard but didn't graduate, because his movie career started to take off.

  “I don’t even have a college degree. As you might have heard, I went to Harvard. I just didn’t graduate from Harvard. I got pretty close, but I started to get movie roles and didn’t finish all my courses. I put on a cap and gown and walked with my class; my mom and dad were there and everything; I just never got an actual degree.You could say I kind of fake graduated."

  Damon was only 12 credits short of graduating from the Ivy; he took the time away from class to audition for, then appear in, Geronimo: An American Legend (1993). It wasn't for naught, however. Damon began the screenplay for Good Will Hunting in a playwriting class at Harvard.
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  (#6) He Spent Part Of His Childhood In A Commune

  Damon's parents divorced when he was two years old. The actor and his brother, Kyle, were raised by their mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early childhood education at Lesley College. When Matt was 10, he and his family moved into a commune in Central Square, Boston, which was shared with five other families. The experience influenced his political tendencies, which he describes as "democratically leaning from the left.”
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  (#7) After Two Failed Relationships, He Refused To Date Anyone In The Industry

  After dating Minnie Driver and Winona Ryder, Damon decided to only go out with "civilians."

  "If you’re with somebody who’s in the business, it becomes exponentially more severe, the attention does,” he said during a 2004 interview with Boston Magazine.

  "So I think if you don’t date anybody who’s in the movie business, you’re one step ahead. And if you don’t live a garish or obnoxious lifestyle, people tend to lose interest. If you’re not going out to nightclubs and dancing on the tables, the [paparazzi] leave you alone, and once they leave you alone then you’re not in the magazines at all, and then the magazines leave you alone."

  Damon married Argentina-born Luciana Barroso in 2005. The two met in Miami, where she was tending bar. They have four daughters. 
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  (#8) He Married His Wife At City Hall

  Despite being a millionaire and celebrity, Damon and wife Lucianna married in a low-key ceremony at City Hall in 2005. According to E! News, the couple agreed to have a big celebration down the road. It took eight years, but in April 2013, they renewed their vows during a $600,000 ceremony in Saint Lucia, surrounded by family and friends. 
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  (#9) He Would Star In An Affleck-Directed Picture Provided Ben Stops Hogging The Best Roles

  Now that Ben Affleck is an Academy Award nominated director, Damon gets asked a lot if he would make a movie directed by his old pal. He would, except, Affleck always takes the best parts.

  "People keep asking me, 'Are you going to work in a movie with Ben?' And I say, 'Well, he’s a brilliant director and I would work with him in a second but the big problem is that when he directs a movie he always gives himself the best role. So, until he breaks that habit none of us can work with him."
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  (#10) He's Never Taken An Acting Job For The Money

  Damon has had a very balanced career. For almost every big studio movie he's been in, like Ocean's Eleven, he's done a low-budget picture like The Informant! (interestingly, both for director Steven Soderbergh). He contends that, with the possible exception of when he first started in the business, he's never taken a job just for the pay.

  "I've passed on a lot of huge-money jobs. Money doesn't enter into the decision-making," he said during an interview with The Guardian in 2013. "If I do a big blockbuster, it's about how big an audience you'll get, and where you can take them."
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  (#11) He Was Supposed To Play The Christian Bale Role In The Fighter But Dropped Out

  Damon was originally cast to play Dicky Eklund opposite fellow-Boston native Mark Wahlberg in the Oscar-winning film The Fighter. After Damon left the production, Bale was cast, and went on to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Damon says he has no regrets with his decision, and that Bale was right for the part.
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  (#12) The Cast Of Saving Private Ryan Totally Resented Matt Damon

  The principal cast of Steven Spielberg's epic war drama Saving Private Ryan were required to participate in a six-day rigorous army training bootcamp. In the film, the solders resent Damon's titular Private Ryan because they're ordered to go behind enemy lines, at great loss, to save him. To make the resentment real, Damon was intentionally left out of the nightmarish training regime.

  "I wasn't invited to the boot camp," Damon explains.

  "It was a great ploy on Steven's part because what it did, since the film is about these eight guys who are looking for one guy, they are risking their lives for this one guy and a resentment breeds among them for this one guy. The boot camp couldn't help but foster a kernel of resentment, because while they are sleeping face down in the rain they were well aware that I was at home in bed. So, by the time I show up on set and flippantly ask, 'Hey, guys how was boot camp?', that resentment is right there. It created that separation."
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  (#13) Manchester By The Sea Was Written For Him To Direct, And At One Point He Was Attached To Star

  Oscar-winning drama Manchester by the Sea took several twists and turns before landing on the big screen. Originally, Damon and John Krasinki approached Kenneth Lonergan to write the script for Damon to direct and Krasinki to star. Lonergan labored over the script for three yeas, during which time Krasinki's schedule changed and Damon had to drop out because of previous commitments.

  Yet it all seemed to work out in the end. Lonergan took over behind the camera and won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Damon stayed on as producer and cast childhood friend Casey Affleck in the lead. Affleck won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2017 for his performance.
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  (#14) He Thinks The Most Important Aspect In Selecting A Movie Is The Quality Of The Director

  There are several factors for an actor to consider when deciding whether or not to sign on for a film: location, story, character, money, co-stars, etc. For Damon, it's all about the director. He told The Guardian in 2015, “That’s all that matters in film. The rest of it is utter bullsh*t. A mediocre director will ruin a great piece of material.” He speaks from experience, claiming to have worked with mediocre directors in the past.

  Damon has worked with some the most renowned directors in American cinema: Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Gus Van Sant, Steven Soderbergh, Christopher Nolan, the Coen Brothers, and Clint Eastwood.
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  (#15) He Credits His Altruism To His Mother

  During Damon's 2016 commencement speech at MIT, the actor urged students to "turn toward the problems you see. Engage with them. Walk right up to them, look them in the eye ... then look yourself in the eye and decide what you’re going to do about them."

  Damon also said there was no substitute for going out and seeing things for yourself. He credits his mother with showing him the world outside of Boston when he was a teenager. That included a trip to Guatemala, where he witnessed extreme poverty. Damon co-founded the charitable organization Water.org, which provides safe, clean drinking water to millions of poverty-stricken people throughout the world.
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  (#16) He's All In For A Sequel To Rounders

  Damon's 1998 poker movie Rounders is often credited with starting the Texas Hold'em boom that began in the late '90s and is alive and well 19 years later. In an interview with Rich Eisen, Damon talked about a potential sequel to the film that would concentrate on online gambling:

  "[Brian] Koppelman and [David] Levien, who wrote it, they have a really good idea for a Rounders story, and that would be an interesting thing because of what’s happened in poker. Now, with the online [game], these guys and gals who are playing, this young generation, they start playing when they’re in their adolescence. They’re looking at 10 hands at a time, playing for real money online. By the time they’re 21, they’ve seen millions and millions and millions of hands…It’s now gone into deep game theory. It’s at a whole other level. It’s just a very, very different game."

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