Matt Damon met his wife Lucy Damon by chance at a bar in Miami while he was filming a movie. He’s a really successful actor, known for movies like Mystic Pizza and Good Will Hunting, which he wrote with his friend Ben Affleck and won an Oscar for. Matt has won lots of awards, including two Golden Globes and six Screen Actors Guild Awards. He’s also been nominated for BAFTA and Primetime Emmy Awards several times.
Even though Matt Damon has been really successful in movies, he feels like the luckiest guy because he met his wife, Luciana Barroso. They’ve been married for 17 years, and he says he really “hit the jackpot” when he found her.
“I’m really happy now, and I feel so lucky. I hit the jackpot with my wife,” he told Ellen.
He was 51 years old at the time and was filming the movie Stuck on You in Miami. After a long day of work, someone asked him if he wanted to go to a bar.
“I was supposed to film in Hawaii, but then they changed it to Miami. I hadn’t spent much time in Miami before. One night during filming, a few guys said they were going for a beer, and I wasn’t really keen, but they convinced me to go. We ended up in a bar where my wife was working as a bartender, and I saw her across the room,” he told Ellen.
Luciana, who was a single mom to her four-year-old daughter at the time, also remembered the moment she met the actor in a rare interview with Vogue Magazine.
“But he had started to get noticed by people who wanted pictures and autographs,” she said, remembering the first time she met her husband.
“And then it got a bit intense because people were drinking, so he came and hid behind my bar… just wanting to hang out and have a drink. He said, ‘I saw you and really wanted to talk to you.’
So, I put him to work with me! I said, ‘If you’re going to be back here, you can’t just stand there!’ He had trained as a bartender for a film years before, so he started making drinks. And he made me a lot of money in tips that night because, of course, everyone wanted to see him. So it turned into a really fun night.”
At that time, unlike most men, Damon was attracted to the fact that she was a mom.
Some guys might have felt differently, finding it complicated, but for him, it wasn’t.
Even with all the success in movies and walking the red carpet, he’ll always just be Matt to her.
“When you meet someone you really connect with, that’s just who they are to you. All the other stuff, like being a movie star, didn’t really matter. He’s just Matt to me.”
The couple got married in 2005. Damon also became a stepdad to Lucy’s daughter Alexia. They have three daughters together: Isabelle, Gia, and Stella.
Damon, who is 51 years old, has been in movies like Bourne Supremacy, Bourne Identity, Talented Mr. Ripley, and Stillwater.
But since getting married and having kids, he says he won’t spend more than two weeks away from his family while filming. If a project needs more time, he tries to bring them along.
“Every decision about making a movie depends on the family. If it’s going to be too hard on them, I just can’t do it,” he said, according to the Daily Mail.
“We try not to be apart for more than two weeks. We have this rule, but the longest we’ve been apart is three weeks.”
He added: “Sometimes it is an adventure. Last year I went to China for six months and it was a big family trip and that was awesome.”
Even though he’s a big star in Hollywood, Damon has kept his family out of the public eye. He says it’s because they’re not interesting enough for the paparazzi to follow.
“They can try to follow me around, but they’ll always get the same story: a middle-aged married guy with four kids,” he told Esquire before.
“So as long as that story doesn’t change much, there’s no real interest. If I’m not doing something crazy, like jumping on a bar, or causing trouble, or cheating on my wife, there’s not much of a story to tell.”