Personal reason Matt Damon is always in Australia
Matt Damon is set to touch down in Australia this week, as he reveals the sweet personal reason why it’s now become an annual holiday for his family.
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Australians have, by this point, adopted Matt Damon as an honorary local, with the US actor having regularly travelled here for low-key holidays away from the Hollywood glare.
The Academy Award winner, who has repeatedly been spotted soaking up quintessentially Aussie experiences from the Ekka in Brisbane, to AFL games and low-key Sunday sessions in Byron Bay, has spent lengthy stints here for several years now.
Now, Damon has revealed there’s a deeply personal reason why he first chose Australia as a travel destination back in 2018.
Speaking to news.com.au ahead of yet another planned visit this week as he wraps a promotional tour for his new Apple TV+ movie The Instigators, the Jason Bourne star said Australia became special to his family, including wife Luciana Barroso and their four daughters, after the death of his beloved father Kent Damon, who lost a lengthy battle with cancer aged 75 in December 2017.
“After my dad died, we moved down there for four months and just went and camped all over the place,” Damon, 53, said.
“And just … I think because maybe he had never been, and it just felt like a place to go to make memories with my kids.
“Then every year we would return, even back during the pandemic. We were down there for about six months, and it’s just like a second home to us.
“We just love it and we love the people and everything about it.”
So much so, Damon opts to skip the American summer in favour of an Aussie winter, where he usually sets up digs in Byron Bay, the northern NSW hotspot his friend and co-star Chris Hemsworth calls home.
“We just have so many friends there. I’m coming back [this week] right after we open this movie. We’re going down for a couple weeks,” he said.
“I mean, we’ve gone the last three summers, our summer, your winter, and everyone’s like, ‘You’re going to Australia? It’s the winter there?’ And we’re like, ‘no, it’s great’.
“We just have so many friends down there, honestly. I mean 30, 40 people. Family, friends, just so many people that we love to go see.”
On the work front, Damon’s latest film heralds yet another beloved Affleck collaboration. This time, with US actor Casey Affleck.
Damon grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, with both Casey, 48, and Ben Affleck, 51. The childhood friends each emerged from humble beginnings to forge successful individual careers in Hollywood.
When attempting to crack it in showbiz, Damon and the Affleck brothers moved into their first place together in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, where they famously penned the Oscar-winning screenplay for 1997’s Good Will Hunting.
While that idea ended up being a masterstroke, Damon revealed things “could’ve gone bad” in this era after their rental home wound up being next door to “really, really hardcore criminals”.
“They were our first neighbours as adults,” Damon said, looking over at Affleck.
“They would just come down and visit us sometimes, we were too scared to tell him to leave,” Affleck remembered, laughing.
There’s not much else to divulge about their shared history that falls into “the PG-13 space”, Affleck said. Where it becomes abundantly clear, though, is through their innate onscreen chemistry.
In The Instigators, a Doug Liman-directed comedy thriller set in their home city of Boston, Damon plays past veteran Rory, a troubled father desperate to reconnect with his estranged son.
After becoming embroiled in a botched criminal plot, Rory forges an unlikely bond with Affleck’s Cobby, a rough-around-the-edges ex-con, as they both embark on a chaotic journey to evade police and corrupt crime figures.
It marks a prominent comeback for Affleck, who apart from a small part in 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer, has been out of the lead role game since his Oscar-winning performance in 2016’s Manchester By The Sea, which was marred by the resurfacing of two prior sexual harassment lawsuits. Both were quietly settled outside court in 2010.
Asked what he was looking for in projects at this point in his career, Affleck said he was being more considerate about his work “in a way that I never have”.
“Which is kind of like, what is this movie and my role in it going to put into the world to be left behind?” Affleck said.
“Is it something that’s going to make people feel good? Is it going to contribute something positive? Is it just more mindless entertainment? Or destructive, accidentally destructive, or violent, or it perpetuates certain stereotypes or just bad ideas?
“I didn’t use to think about that when I was younger. I just didn’t understand the impact of movies and was thinking more about myself, I guess.
“But now I think a lot about that, and doing The Instigators was something that I felt really good in terms of that mentality. I really was like, ‘OK, this is something that’s fun. It’ll be fun for me to be a part of.’
“It would be fun to spend time with Matt, other people I like and respect, and I think it will make other people feel good. I would be happy watching it with my kids. I’m thinking more in those terms these days.”
The dry humour peppered throughout the film’s one-hour, 40 minute run time is subtly funny. Perhaps more niche than for your wider audience.
This writer notes this observation to Affleck, who co-wrote the script with Chuck MacLean. He muses how Australians often share a similar sense of humour with Boston folk, referencing his own friendship with Melbourne-raised director Andrew Dominik.
“He [Dominik] always says that people from Boston and people from Australia, they’re kind of like cousins. He says, we’re a lot alike, mostly in our sense of humour, and I find that to be true,” Affleck said.
“Aussies always really make me laugh, they’re really funny, and I tell people, I’m like, ‘Australians are the best. They’re the funniest.’ And then I’m like, ‘oh, maybe it’s just I’m from Boston and we have the same humour.’
He continued, “I hadn’t done a lot of comedy, so the whole thing was a little bit risky for me. And I know that I’m not often thought of as being very funny, so I knew that it was going to be sort of a steep incline there. But I also know that Matt isn’t that funny, so I sort of felt like it was a level playing field.”
The Instigators is on Apple TV+ from August 9.
Originally published as Personal reason Matt Damon is always in Australia
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