No matter how far Matt Damon’s travels may take him, his heart is with his wife, Luciana Barroso Damon, and their four daughters. Luckily for the actor, The Odyssey was set to be a summer blockbuster, so he could take his entire family to the London premiere of his latest film.
“I went to London last week to promote the movie, and the girls came with me,” Damon told PEOPLE at the July 7 event. “It’s great because they had to make a sacrifice too. I was gone for a while, and they came and saw me, but it was a huge, long movie, a brutal film to make, and I’m really happy for the girls to see it tonight.”
Although that includes his children in general, one of them–either Alexia, 27, Isabella, 20, Gia, 17, or Stella, 15–was particularly delighted to inform him that she was proud of him after seeing the 172-minute-long production. (“Probably the one who said there was nothing great about my alien movie last year,” he joked.) “She’s never said anything like that because we’re always messing around, so at that point I realized, ‘I’m good, it was all worth it,'” Damon said.
Matt Damon’s Family Has Always Come First
And that’s what being a dad is all about, really. For Damon and Barroso, it began in 2003 when the couple met while she was working as a bartender in Miami. He was filming the Farrelly brothers’ comedy Stuck on You and immediately became enthralled with Barroso. Good Will Hunting star was 33 at the time and had begun to realize that he may have missed his chance at finding “the One.”
“My brother found his soul mate very young; he was just 26 when they got married,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “He’d been married for 10 years before I met my wife, and I kind of looked at this really happy, wonderful marriage and thought, ‘That’s not going to happen for me.’ And then it did.” It was becoming a father figure to Barroso’s then-4-year-old Alexia, however, that opened Matt Damon’s eyes to a different kind of happiness.
“I jumped in the deep end right away,” Matt Demon’s said in 2011 when speaking with Parade about becoming Alexia’s “extra dad.” They married on Dec. 9, 2005, and went on to welcome three more children into their lives, becoming one of Hollywood’s most under-discussed couples. “I’ve been left alone, even by the paparazzi,” Damon said. “Because what sells is sex and scandal. To the extent that that’s absent, they don’t really have much interest in you. I’m still married, still working, still happy.”
Matt’s Marriage Is Built on Family Rules
Damon gives a hearty shout-out to anyone deserving in matters like child-rearing where his family is involved. Raising a family, especially with a wife, is the main part of Damon. That said, he gives it up for whoever does it correctly. During the promotion period for The Martian in 2017, he had an interview with E! News that Barroso “deserves a medal or something.”
The couple made a pact not to be apart for more than two weeks at a time and stuck to it for nearly two decades–until they made an exception for their daughters. “We sort of had this family rule about it, and the kids let me do it,” Damon said when speaking with CBS News in July 2021 about the decision to film Stillwater in Oklahoma and France. “This was my first movie where that rule kind of got broken. So, that was hard, and it actually helped with the movie, I think, because it was easy to access the things that I needed to be inspired by because I was so, so, so very much missing my kids.”
The couple has since re-established the “two-week” rule, and Damon is quick to note that they will most definitely be adhering to it in the future. “When we moved out here [to California] in ’03, we were sort of in a place in New York where my friend Ben [Affleck] lived in Pacific Palisades, and we were right across the street from him. But we moved up to Brooklyn Heights last year,” Matt Damon shared.
He admits that he was always concerned about his girls growing up with too much privilege since they were “growing up with much more than either one of us ever had.” “But when I went to Harvard, I met a lot of students who were very, very wealthy, and some of them were really hurting, and their parents were not present in their lives at all, you know? And I felt very sorry for them, saying, ‘Oh, I get it, like, money doesn’t buy you everything,'” the Boston native reflected.
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Matt Damon’s Daughters Continue to Inspire Him
It seems that his words were not in vain–five years later, Matt Damon’s daughters are thriving, and so far, have proven to be incredibly gracious about their father’s dating life. So far, at least, Damon has been “pretty kind” to the men his daughters brought home, he joked to E!. News on June 14 at the Los Angeles premiere of The Odyssey. That means he hasn’t had to come up with that classic line, which he has quoted his pal Sean Penn for the full Graham Norton Show last 2015 episode.
It was basically advising a daughter’s boyfriend (Damon’s version): “Whatever you do to her, I’m gonna do to you when you get home.” Besides the fact that Damon and Barroso are managing two teenagers, they still realize that it was an incredible chance for them that they succeeded in bringing all four of the kids together for the international press tour to promote The Odyssey, “ We have two older kids who have moved out, and I feel that these past few years are going to be over really, really fast, and, because of that, we are making sure not to miss a single moment of it,” Damon spoke with PEOPLE about the film release day, July 17.
Having put so much effort and sacrifices, not to forget the long morning workouts that he went through in order to do justice to the role of Odysseus (Barroso has “always supported me when I told her I was going to commit to the workouts to get in shape”), Damon is very glad to have his family spending time with him through this moment. “ Everybody is being a delight,” he stated to Entertainment Tonight while in London. “They are all having enjoyment while I am doing the work, but they being present there has brought a lot of fun and happiness to the work. We are all so mature that this morning I found my eyes getting very, very wet while witnessing them.”
