I’d like to think everyone has heard the story of how Matt Damon met his wife, Luciana Barroso, because it’s honestly like something out of a movie. But if you haven’t, it’d be my honor to enlighten you.
So, when he was a rising star in Hollywood in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Matt had relationships with fellow celebs like Minnie Driver and Winona Ryder. However, he wound up meeting his wife-to-be totally unexpectedly in 2003 when she was a non-famous single mom working behind a bar in Miami.
As the story goes, Matt was shooting the movie Stuck on You and came to the bar for a drink with his film crew. This was in April 2003, by which point, he was already very, very famous, having starred in movies like Saving Private Ryan, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Bourne Identity, and, of course, Good Will Hunting, for which he won an Oscar.
As you can imagine, Matt was inundated with attention, and so, he decided to hide behind the bar for some respite. It was there that he got chatting to Luciana, whom he’d already spotted from across the room.
After hitting it off, Luciana suggested that Matt should help serve some drinks, and, of course, he got straight to work. “He had trained as a bartender for a film years before, so he started making drinks,” Luciana told Vogue Australia in 2018. “He made me a ton of money in tips that night, because of course everyone wanted to go and see him. So it turned into a really fun night.”
They got married two years later and have since had three daughters together: Isabella, Gia, and Stella. Matt is also a proud stepfather to Luciana’s daughter Alexia, who was four years old when they met.
Fast forward nearly 23 years since that fateful night in Miami, and Matt has just shared an all-important detail about his and Luciana’s early relationship.
Appearing on The Howard Stern Show on Jan. 12 alongside his BFF Ben Affleck, Matt revealed that when Luciana first watched Good Will Hunting in theaters in 1997, he wasn’t the actor she was drawn to.
“This is fucking completely true: After we’d been together for a little while, probably a few months, she admitted that — 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,” Matt said as his bestie laughed alongside him. “I’m like ‘You got the wrong one?!’”
In response, Howard joked that a piece of information like that could “stay with you” and cause tension. However, Ben stepped in to clarify that he and Luciana have always had a firmly platonic relationship — particularly now that they work together.
“She produced my last movie. She’s a great producer and a really good friend, and yeah, I never got that vibe from her,” Ben said, laughing. “So I think something I did in real life rubbed it off.”
“Finally, she met him, and all that went away,” Matt quipped. Before joking that if Luciana ever left him for Ben, he’d lose his “two favorite people.” Awwwww.
My friends and I always used to say that you can tell a lot about a person based on whether they’re more attracted to Matt or Ben in Good Will Hunting, but maybe this changes everything… Matt and Ben’s new movie, The Rip, starts streaming on Netflix on Jan. 16. You can find the Howard Stern interview clip here.
