In the summer of 2021, Matt Damon got into trouble. He was the villain for a few newscycles and after that summer, no one has ever brought it up again, and he’s never been asked about it again. What was the controversy? In 2021, he said in an interview that he used a homophobic slur (the f-word) in front of his daughters “a few months” prior, and his horrified daughters wrote him a “treatise” on why he needed to never say that word again. He got an immediate backlash, and within 24 hours, he issued a statement where he lied about the context about his f-slur usage and the frequency of his usage. He tried to make it clear that he stands “with the LGBTQ community” and that he’s not a rampant homophobe. Well, this month, to promote The Rip, Matt and Ben Affleck appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience. While Rogan obviously did not ask Matt about how recently he’s used homophobic slurs, Matt did have some thoughts about “cancel culture,” having been canceled for about 72 hours, four and a half years ago.
On cancel culture: Joe Rogan described being “canceled” as “this idea that one thing you said or one thing you did, and now we’re going to exaggerate that to the fullest extent and cast you out of civilization for life.” Damon replied: “In perpetuity… Because I bet some of those people would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months or whatever, and then come out and say, ‘I paid my debt. Like, we’re done. Like, can we be done?’ The thing about that getting kind of excoriated, publicly like that, it just never ends. And it’s the first thing that… you know, it just will follow you to the grave.”
Watching OBAA on IMAX: “I went to see One Battle After Another on IMAX — there’s nothing like that feeling. You’re in with you know a bunch of strangers, but people in your community and you’re having this experience together. I always say it’s more like going to church — you show up at an appointed time. It doesn’t wait for you.” Watching at home is a very different experience, Damon said. “You’re watching in a room, the lights are on, other shit’s going on, the kids are running around, the dogs are running around, whatever it is. It’s just a very different level of attention that you’re willing, or that you’re able to give to it.”
Netflix’s rules: “For instance, Netflix — the standard way to make an action movie, that we learned, was you usually have three set pieces. One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third — and the big one with all the explosions and you spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your kind of finale. Now, [Netflix is] like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes?’ We want people to stay tuned in. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching. It’s going to really start to infringe on how we’re telling these stories.”
“In perpetuity,” he cried, promoting his starring role in a Netflix film, having recently wrapped the lead role in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, two years after he was part of the ensemble for Oppenheimer, a film which won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars. Matt’s cancel-culture whines are the perfect encapsulation of the failure of cancel culture, even if he didn’t specify that he was talking about himself. Matt was crying salty white tears for the other white men who were briefly “canceled” for doing horrendous sh-t, and then turned “being canceled” into their whole comeback narrative/shtick. Just one example out of dozens in Matt’s circle: Casey Affleck, who was so brutally canceled that he went on to… win an Oscar for Best Actor.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images and Backgrid.
