Watch: Matt Damon Reveals How He Really Feels About His 4 Daughters Dating
However far away from home Matt Damon‘s travels take him, his heart remains with wife Luciana Barroso Damon and their four daughters.
Happily, The Odyssey was scheduled to be a summer blockbuster, meaning the actor—who plays the eponymous hero in Christopher Nolan‘s epic, in theaters July 17—was able to take his whole family on a journey to the movie’s London premiere.
“It’s great because they had to sacrifice a lot, too, for this,” Damon told Peopleat the July 7 event. “I went away for a while, they came and visited, but it was a lot. It was a very long movie, very grueling shoot, and I’m really excited for my girls to see it tonight.”
Better yet, though, was one of his daughters—he didn’t specify whether it was Alexia, 27, Isabella, 20, Gia, 17, or Stella, 15—telling him she was proud after watching the 172-minute film. (Perhaps it was whoever told him there was “nothing great” about his 2017 alien action flick The Great Wall.)
“She’s never said anything like that because we joke around a lot,” Damon noted, “and so at that point, I was like, ‘I’m good. It was all worth it.'”
Such is the life of a devoted girl dad, right?
And it all started when he met Barroso in 2003 while she was bartending in Miami. Damon was in town playing a conjoined twin in the Farrelly brothers comedy Stuck on You, and he promptly got stuck on her.
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The Good Will Hunting star was 33 at the time and had started to wonder if he would ever meet the One.
“My brother found his soul mate very young, he’d just turned 26 when they were married,” Damon told The Hollywood Reporterin 2015. “He’d been married for 10 years by the time I even met my wife, and I looked at this really happy, wonderful marriage and kind of went, ‘I guess that’s not going to happen for me.’ And then it did.”
But it was becoming a father that changed everything.
Barroso was already mom to then-4-year-old Alexia from a previous relationship and Damon “jumped into the deep end,” as he told Parade in 2011, becoming “an extra dad.”
They tied the knot on Dec. 9, 2005, and never looked back, going on to have three more kids together and remain one of the least gossiped about couples in Hollywood.
“I’ve been left alone, even by the paparazzi,” Damon said, “because what sells is sex and scandal. Absent that, they really don’t have much interest in you. I’m still married, still working, still happy.”
And Damon has always given credit where it’s due when it comes to keeping their household in order in his absence.
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Promoting The Martian in 2017, he told E! News that his wife “deserves a medal or something.”
Early in their relationship, the couple put in place the two-week rule of not going any longer without seeing each other, and they stuck with it for almost two decades. And they only relaxed the terms of their agreement with their daughters’ blessing.
“We kind of had a family meeting about it and my kids let me do it,” Damon told CBS News in July 2021 about getting the go-ahead to make Stillwater in Oklahoma and Marseilles, France. “This was the first movie where [the rule had] been violated. So, that was tough, and it helped with the performance. It was easy to access what I needed to access because I was really missing my kids.”
But, Damon added, the rule had since been “firmly reestablished, and, yeah, it’s off the table. We’re never breaking it again!”
In 2013, the family moved from New York to L.A., their house down the street from Damon’s BFF Ben Affleck in the Pacific Palisades, but they re-settled in Brooklyn Heights in 2021.
Damon admittedly worried about overdoing it with the privilege, noting that his kids were “growing up with a lot more stuff than their mom or I ever had.”
But, the Boston native continued, “When I got to Harvard, I met a lot of kids who are very wealthy, some of them were in a lot of pain. Their parents weren’t there for them, you know, like at all. And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I get it, like, money doesn’t solve anything.'”
Fast-forward five years, and it sounds as though his daughters know that Dad has their best interests at heart.
So far, at least, Damon had been “pretty kind” to the guys his girls have brought home, he told E! News June 14 at the L.A. premiere of The Odyssey. Meaning, he hadn’t yet had to invoke his favorite Sean Penn line—shared by the three-time Oscar winner on The Graham Norton Showin 2015—which was to tell his daughter’s suitor (as Damon paraphrased), “Whatever you do to her, I’m gonna do to you when you get home.”
And while he and Barroso still have two teenagers in high school, Damon knows he was lucky to be able to get the whole gang together for his global Odyssey press tour.
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“Having two older kids who are out of the nest and knowing how fast these final years go,” he told Peopleahead of the film’s July 17 release, “we’re trying to be mindful of holding onto what we can.”
But after all the sacrifice, and the disruptive 4 a.m. wakeup calls to work out to get in shape to play Odysseus—Barroso “was on board with it when I started to come together,” Damon quipped to E!—he was excited to focus on his family.
“They’re all having fun while I’m working, but I’m so happy they’re here,” he told Entertainment Tonight in London. “Everybody’s so grown up. Like, I got a real dad teary moment seeing them today.”
See more of Damon’s favorite moments—i.e. time spent with his wife and daughters—through the years:
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