For the latest time in the last half dozen years, Matt Damon is facing backlash for opening up his mouth. In this case, he reveal that he only recently stopped using an an anti-LGBTQ slur, but only because his daughter explained to him that it was offensive.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, the 51-year-old actor clearly thought he was telling a sweet father-daughter story that he hoped would humanize him. But to many across social media, it only revealed how out of touch he remains in whatever bubble he has admitted living in as a rich and famous “white male American movie star.”
“The word that my daughter calls the ‘f-slur for a homosexual’ was commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application,” Damon said while doing press for his new film, “Stillwater.”
“I made a joke, months ago, and got a treatise from my daughter,” Damon explained. “She left the table. I said, ‘Come on, that’s a joke! I say it in the movie ‘Stuck on You!’ She went to her room and wrote a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous. I said, ‘I retire the f-slur!’ I understood.”
In addition to leaving people stunned that he only recently seemed to realize that the term was offensive, the self-described Hollywood liberal also made people wonder why he would even share the story in the first place.
“I want to know what word Matt Damon has replaced f—– with,” the comedian Billy Eichner tweeted.
“I’ve lost some respect for Matt Damon for two reasons,” added Canadian comedian Deven Green, known on Twitter as Mrs. Betty Bowers. “1. Being a 51-year-old Harvard-educated person who only realized using homophobic slurs was a bad thing ‘months’ ago; and 2. Being foolish enough to think that was a cute story he should share with the world.”
Hollywood Reporter TV critic Daniel Fienberg also said: “As a member of the press, I like when celebrities talk to the press, but it’s always illuminating to hear the stories that folks like Liam Neeson or Matt Damon think are humanizing and charming, but actually reveal insulation and isolation (among other unsavory stuff) instead.”
His story about using the anti-gay slur isn’t the first time Damon’s been called out for saying something boneheaded when wading into a cultural conversation, giving people reason to wonder “if anything unsavory” might lurk beneath “the affable exterior,” as a recent New York Times Magazine profile on Damon explained.
The first time Damon faced serious backlash for his cultural commentary was during the 2015 season of “Project Greenlight,” an HBO reality show about first-time filmmakers that the actor and his friend Ben Affleck co-produced and appeared in as mentors to the young talent.
In one episode, Effie Brown, a Black female producer, questioned the show’s lack of diversity. In response, Damon lectured her on the right way to achieve it, but in a way that came across as paternalistic and downplayed the importance of behind-the-scenes diversity.
In the ensuing backlash, Damon’s comments gave rise to the Twitter hashtag #damonsplaining, a variation on the terms “mansplaining” and “whitesplaining.”
Damon’s foot-in-mouth tendencies arose again at the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017 when he was asked about working with Harvey Weinstein and knowing the producer had harassed his friend and co-star, Gwyneth Paltrow. Damon opined loosely about the “spectrum of behavior” when it comes to sexual misconduct, offered sympathy to other #MeToo targets, including Louis C.K., and said it’s unfortunate that America’s reckoning over sexual misconduct isn’t giving credit to all the men who haven’t harassed or assaulted women.
Damon subsequently apologized for his #MeToo comments on the “Today” show, saying “I really wish I’d listened a lot more before I weighed in on this.” The actor then praised prominent women in Hollywood who are leading the Time’s Up anti-sexual harassment initiative and said he should “close my mouth for a while.”
He clearly hasn’t kept his mouth shut, even though he has admitted that he knows he should. In the New York Times profile, Damon acknowledged that both his “Project Greenlight” and his #MeToo comments made him come off as an emotionally ignorant — “a rich white guy unaware of his own blinkered view.”
“I was and am tone-deaf,” Damon told the New York Times. “Like everybody, I’m a prisoner of my subjective experience and that leads to having blind spots. Me more than most given the experience that I’ve had as a white male American movie star. It’s a very rarefied air. I don’t even know where my blind spots begin and end. So, yes, I was and am tone-deaf. I do try my best not to be.”
In yet another recent interview, this one with Marc Maron for his “WTF” podcast, Damon admitted that he didn’t understand why there was controversy over his 2016 film “The Great Wall,” a movie made in China with him playing the “white savior” protagonist.
The widely panned blockbuster was blasted for its superficial, stereotypical portrayal of Chinese culture, and for being yet another example of Hollywood “whitewashing” that was made solely to win audiences in the lucrative Chinese market.
Damon told Maron that this was not the case, nor did he see it as cultural appropriation.
“I saw the movie as the exact same plot as Lawrence of Arabia, Dances With Wolves (and) Avatar,” he said. “It’s an outsider comes into a new culture, finds value in the culture, brings some skill from the outside that aids them in their fight against whatever and they’re all changed forever.”
In discussing “The Great Wall,” Damon also mentioned that his daughter gives him a hard time about this box-office flop. “She’s playfully hard on me,” Damon said. “She crushes me on the ones that don’t work.”
“Whenever she talks about the movie, she calls it ‘The Wall,'” Damon continued. “And I’m like, come on, it’s called ‘The Great Wall.’ And she’s like, ‘Dad, there’s nothing great about that movie.'”
In the Sunday Times interview, Damon seemed less willing to acknowledge that he’s the reason he gets in trouble when opening his mouth. Instead, he put the blame on the media. He lamented the tendency among journalists to listen less to “the music” of a person’s comments and listen more to the “lyrics,” which he said get “parsed” and pulled out of context to create the “best headline possible. He also seemed to say that getting “parsed” has become inevitable.
“Everyone needs clicks,” Damon said. “Before it didn’t really matter what I said, because it didn’t make the news. But maybe this shift is a good thing. So I shut the (expletive) up more.”
