Matt Damon has suggested that some people who’ve been “cancelled” in the public eye would have preferred prison.
The Oscar-winning star of Good Will Hunting was asked about “cancel culture” during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s US podcast to promote his new film.
Rogan, who regularly rallies against supposed cancel culture, asked Damon for his thoughts on the matter, while arguing that cancellation means that one infraction is “exaggerated to the fullest extent” and a person is subsequently “cast out of civilisation for life”.
Damon seemed responsive to this definition, replying “[and] in perpetuity”.
The actor added: “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, [and] publicly like that – [is that] it just never ends,” he continued. “It just will follow you to the grave.”
Damon was appearing on the podcast with his friend and long-time collaborator Ben Affleck. The pair co-star in The Rip, an action thriller for Netflix that The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey called “charmless” and “seemingly made for people who are busy scrolling on their phones”.
Damon has got into short-lived hot water once or twice over the years, notably in 2021 when he was forced to issue a statement clarifying that he does not “use slurs of any kind”.
He had previously said in an interview that he only “retired the f-slur” several months earlier when his daughter “wrote a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous” after overhearing her father use it in a joke.
Damon, following backlash, said that he understood why his quote “led many to assume the worst”, but insisted “I have never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening”.
In 2017, Damon was also publicly lambasted by the actor Minnie Driver, who starred alongside him in Good Will Hunting and dated him for several years, after he said that the #MeToo movement was “wonderful” and “necessary” but that “there’s a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation … [and that] those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated”.
“God God, seriously?” Driver asked on Twitter. “Gosh it’s so interesting (profoundly unsurprising) how men with all these opinions about women’s differentiation between sexual misconduct, assault and rape reveal themselves to be utterly tone deaf and as a result, systemically part of the problem.”
