Matt Damon revealed that before meeting him, his wife thought Ben Affleck was the “cute one.”
Matt Damon's wife nearly became enamored with his closest friend. The Oppenheimer star disclosed that Luciana Barroso Damon, his wife of 20 years, originally developed feelings for Matt's best friend Ben Affleck when she watched them together on the big screen about thirty years ago.
“This is f--king completely true,” in a joint appearance with Ben on The Howard Stern Show on January 12, Matt said. “After we’d been together for probably a few months, I think I met her best friend from high school and it came out that the two of them went and saw Good Will Hunting together and her best friend thought I was the cute one and she thought Ben was the cute one.”
“So, she admitted to me,” the 55-year-old added. “I’m like, ‘You got the wrong one?!’ She told me that 23 years ago.”
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When host Howard made a joke about how something like that "stays with you," Matt responded, "Well, I remember it now, Howard."
As it happens, Ben and Luciana are now working together professionally; the 49-year-old is even producing Ben's next movie, Animals.
“She’s a great producer and a really good friend,” Ben, 53, gushed. “And I never got that vibe from her. So, I think something I did in real life rubbed it off.”
Regarding Matt's theory, the former Bourne star cracked up, “Finally she met him and all that went away.”
Howard's comment that it would be "devastating" if Luciana left Matt for his best friend stoked the flames of Luciana's previous crush on Ben even more, prompting Matt to acknowledge, “If my two favorite people just exited my life? Yeah, that would suck.”
First meeting while he was filming Stuck on You in Miami in 2003, Matt and Luciana who have children Alexia, 25, Isabella, 19, Gia, 17, and Stella, 15 were married in a private ceremony in 2005. And each of them will always remember the night they first met.
“I was working as a bartender in South Beach (Miami), and he was shooting a movie there and the crew ended up in the bar one Saturday night,” in 2018, Luciana was recalled by Vogue Australia. “Matt’s story is that he saw me across the room and there was a light on me. And I’m like: ‘Yeah it was a nightclub—there were lights everywhere!’”
In order to conceal from the customers, he eventually joined her behind the bar. Luciana recalls him saying, "Oh, I saw you and I really wanted to talk to you."
“We definitely had a connection right away, it was so easy to talk to each other we were very comfortable,” she revealed. “When you meet somebody that you have a connection with, that’s just the person that you have a connection with, all the other stuff—the movie-star part—wasn’t really a factor. It was just Matt, to me he’s just Matt.”