Matt Damon says Hollywood’s ruthless nature impacts his role as a father

After decades in the spotlight, Matt Damon is opening up about how Hollywood’s “ruthless” nature has impacted his most important job to date: being a father.

In an interview with GQ, Damon — who stars as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, in Christopher Nolan’s highly-anticipated film, “The Odyssey” — got candid about the constant uncertainty within the entertainment business and explained the sacrifices that came with it while being a dad to his four daughters.

“There’s less of that kind of young person’s engine of needing to prove something and more about, like, accepting work and doing it on your terms and doing it as precisely and as well as you can. I think about it a lot, especially as my kids are getting older: really trying to be here now,” said Damon, who is dad to Isabella, 19, Gia, 17, and Stella, 15, as well as Alexia, 26, from his wife Luciana’s first marriage. “And it’s hard for me to do that.”

“I think maybe that has to do with my own nature,” he added. “It also has to do with this career where you’re always trying to figure out what’s ahead, because it’s such an uncertain business and a pretty ruthless one. Those kinds of things have conspired to, I think, maybe take me out of where I am, more than I’d like.”

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Damon was 18 years old when he took on his first role in Hollywood, a one-line dialogue in the 1980s film, “Mystic Pizza.” His breakthrough role as Will Hunting in “Good Will Hunting” alongside Ben Affleck came in 1997.

“I don’t think either of us stopped for years,” Damon told GQ about himself and Affleck after the release of “Good Will Hunting.” “I mean, I think I worked five straight years, literally out of these two duffel bags that I had. And I traveled everywhere and just literally would go from set to set. And I loved it. It was great. I loved what I was doing. I didn’t want to stop. There’s that insecurity of actors of like, the phone’s going to stop ringing.”

“There’s that list that you hear about, and you never know,” Damon said. “I mean, you know if you’re on it if your phone’s ringing a lot, but you don’t…. There’s no official list, but there is—sometimes you can get a movie greenlit at a studio, but not at another studio, and you’re really aware of that. I’ve always been really aware of that.”

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There are some parts of the job, however, that helped him adapt as a father.

“I feel like fatherhood has made my job a lot easier in a lot of ways,” Damon told Fatherly in 2021. “All those emotions that I used to have to reach for are just readily accessible. I don’t have to twist myself into knots to find something—it’s just sitting right there all the time.”

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When it comes to chasing roles, Damon said he slowed down significantly over the past decade, as he focused more on being home with his family, as well as working within his production company he founded with Affleck, Artists Equity.

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“My youngest is a freshman, and I’ve been through this a few times and I know how quickly these years go,” he told GQ.

However, when the opportunity to take on his latest role in “The Odyssey” arose, he was fully in.

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“It’s a little bewildering,” he told GQ. “Because of where the movie business is going, it was a really weird movie for me personally, in the sense that I had almost a nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it, because it felt like movies were when I started working. And I know that that’s going away. I knew that this was the last chance I was ever going to have to do something like this.”

While Damon has had to navigate the pros and cons to work-life balance as a father, he knows at the end of the day, life moves fast. 

“Your kids show up—like that spirit that soul is there, and it’s going to do what it’s going to do,” he said during an appearance on Travis and Jason Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast. “The nurture part is very important; you’re going to be helping with that, but they really are who they are right away.”

As far as his parental advice?

“Don’t blink,” he told the Kelce brothers.