The star thought about how his longtime wife Luciana Barroso made him want to be a “professional actor” and “give it everything he had.”
Matt Damon talked about how his wife Luciana Barroso helped him when he “fell into a depression” on the set of a movie.
During an interview on “Jake’s Takes,” the 52-year-old actor was asked what the best business advice a significant other had ever given him was.
“I think that sometimes you’re in a movie that you know might not be what you hoped it would be, but you’re still making it,” the “Oppenheimer” star said, without naming any specific movies.
He went on, “You’re halfway done with production, but you still have months to go, and you’ve taken your family somewhere and caused them trouble.”
“I remember my wife pulling me out of sadness when I was like, “What have I done?”
“And she just said, ‘We’re here now,'” Damon remembered. “I am proud to be a professional actress, in large part because of her. And what it means to be a professional actress is that you go to work for 15 hours a day and give it your all, even though you know you’re going to fail.
Damon and Barroso met when he was in Miami Beach filming his 2003 comedy “Stuck on You.” After a day of filming, a few of Damon’s coworkers convinced him to go out with them to the bars. Barroso was working as a bartender at Crobar, where the group of people ended up.
“I saw her across a crowded room, literally,” Damon said during a 2011 interview on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” “That’s how my life is now, after eight years and four kids. If that hadn’t happened, I don’t know how else we would have met.”
In 2005, they got married and now have three daughters: Isabella, 16, Gia, 14, and Stella, 12. From a former relationship, the Oscar winner is also the dad of Barroso’s 24-year-old daughter Alexia.
Even though Damon didn’t name the movie that gave him “depression,” he has talked in the past about working on a movie that he realized was a “turkey” while it was being made.
When he was on the “WTF” show in 2021, Matt Damon talked about making his 2016 monster movie “The Great Wall.” The movie bombed at the box office, making less than $50 million in the U.S., and it has a terrible 35% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
“I was like, wow, this is exactly how disasters happen,” Damon told host Marc Maron. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t work as a movie.”
“I came to think that was what it meant to be a professional actor: to know you’re in a turkey and say, ‘OK, I’ve got four more months,'” he said. “It’s the battle on Hamburger Hill that starts at dawn. I’m going to die here, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ I don’t think you can get any less clever than that. I hope I never feel like that again,”
