Matt Damon’s kids keep him humble. During an interview on CBS Sunday Morning, the 50-year-old actor revealed one of his daughter’s rules about which of his movies she’ll she.
Damon shares Isabella, 15, Gia, 12, and Stella, 10, with his wife, Luciana Barroso. The actor is also step-dad to Barroso’s 22-year-old daughter, Alexia, from a previous relationship.
“My 15-year-old refuses to see it,” Damon said of Isabella’s thoughts on his 1997 breakout hit, 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 s**t.”
Damon went on to give one example of how Isabella did just that.
“My daughter said, ‘Remember that movie you did, The Wall?’ I said, ‘It was called The Great Wall,'” Damon recalled of his 2016 film. “She goes, ‘Dad, there’s nothing great about that movie.’ She keeps my feet firmly on the ground.”
Isabella may have another film of her dad’s that she needs opt out of with his latest project, Stillwater, which is due out July 30. Damon stars in the film as Bill Baker, an American oil-rig worker who travels to France to visit his estranged daughter, who’s in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit.
“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,” Damon explained. “I just thought it was a beautiful story, such a great role. So I went for it. I like that they know that I love my job. They know that it’s time consuming, it’s a lot of work, and that it fills me up.”
The film was so important to Damon, he said, that he broke one of his family’s big rules to be a part of it.
“We have a two week rule in our family, that we’re not apart for more than two weeks, and this was the first movie where we violated it, so that was really tough, and really actually helped, I think, the performance,” he said. “It was very easy to access what I needed to access because I was really missing my kids.”
As for the rule, Damon said, “It’s firmly reestablished. It’s off the table. We’re never breaking it again.”
The film premiered to a five-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this month, praise that made Damon visibly emotional.
“I’m getting old, man. I think I get choked up easier now,” he said of the moment. “Ever since I had kids, it’s like my job has become a lot easier because I don’t have to try, I don’t have to reach for any emotions, whether it’s joy, or whether it’s pain, because it’s all nearby because the stakes are so much higher when you have kids.”
