There was once a point when Matt Damon was one of the most eligible bachelors in Hollywood. The Good Will Hunting star who exploded onto the Hollywood scene with fellow bachelor and best friend, Ben Affleck, had the good looks and down-to-earth personality that many in the celebrity world would find too good to be true within their crazy society fueled by ego, glitz, and glamour. So based on that, it would be natural to assume that Damon eventually ended up with a fellow celebrity or some big-name businesswoman. But that actually couldn’t be further from the truth. So who is Matt Damon’s wife?
Born October 8th, 1970, Matt Damon has had a long and impressive career in film. Aside from his role in Good Will Hunting, which he wrote and starred in, Damon has been in countless movies over the years, many of them iconic in cinema history. His discography has included iconic films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Dogma (1999), The Departed (2006), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and Ford v Ferrari (2019).
He’s most famous for his role as the super-enhanced assassin, Jason Bourne, in The Bourne Identity trilogy. Some would even argue that the franchise is one of the most successful projects of his career. And if you’ve seen the Bourne movies, it’s kind of tough to disagree.
And the list goes on. We could honestly be here all day rattling off names of various Matt Damon movies, and we still wouldn’t have covered his entire resume. There’s a reason why Forbes has ranked him among the most bankable stars; all the films that he’s been in have collectively earned $3.88 billion at the box office so far. So it’s safe to say the Academy Award winner has also made a lot of money doing his time as an actor. With so much fame and fortune, Damon probably could have had his pick of any partner in the world. But the 50-year-old never let any of that change him. Deep down, he was just a regular guy looking for genuine love.
“I remember thinking, in my early 30s, that I wouldn’t [get married], you know?” the Stillwater actor told the Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “I didn’t think it was going to happen for me. My brother found his soulmate very young; he’d just turned 26 when they were married. 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.”
Damon would meet Luciana Barroso in 2003 while the Argentinian single mother was working as a bartender in Miami. The way they met is actually a very interesting and organic tale.
“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!’” she recalled in a 2018 interview with Vogue Australia. “But he had started getting recognized and asked for pictures and autographs, and then it got kind of aggressive because people are drinking and stuff, and so he came and hid behind my bar … [wanting to] just hang out back there and have a drink. He says, ‘Oh, I saw you and I really wanted to talk to you.’”
Adorable, right? But wait, the tale only continues to get even more adorable afterward,
“So I put him to work with me! I said, ‘You know, if you’re going to be back here, you can’t just be standing there!’ Barroso continues in the interview,’ He had trained as a bartender for a film years before, so he started making drinks. And 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 and then 15 years later here we are!”
Even in real life, Matt Damon is definitely not your average person, and Barroso noticed that right away about the star who would be her future husband.
“We definitely had a connection right away. It was so easy to talk to each other [and] we were very comfortable [with each other], and by the end of the night, he invited me to go out with his friends. But I was like, ‘I can’t, I have a 4-year-old daughter, I’m not going anywhere’… and that was one of the things he loved, that I had a daughter. He said, ‘I love that you’re a mum and that’s your priority,’” she said.
“Some guys might have been different, they might think it’s complicated, but for him, it wasn’t,” Barroso continued. “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.”
Two years later, the couple got married in 2005, making Damon a stepfather for the first time to Barroso’s daughter, Alexis. The Damons would then welcome their first biological child together, Isabella, in 2006. They would have their second daughter, Gia, in 2008 and their third daughter, Stella, in 2010.
Over a decade later, the couple is still going strong, and Damon attributes a lot of that to his unique situation compared to some of his famous peers.
“The narrative about me kind of goes, ‘He’s a boring married guy,’ which is great, because I don’t get any of that other stuff like Brad Pitt and George Clooney do. People think I’m kind of vanilla, and they leave me alone to work, have an actual private life and be a husband and dad,” he once said in an interview with Playboy magazine.
“I fell in love with a civilian. Not an actress and not a famous actress at that. Because then the attention doesn’t double — it grows exponentially. Because then suddenly everybody wants to be in your bedroom,” he explained in a 2013 interview with Esquire magazine. “But I don’t really give them anything. If I’m not jumping up and down on a bar, or lighting something on fire, or cheating on my wife, there’s not really any story to tell. They can try to stake me out, but they’re always going to get the same story — a middle-aged married guy with four kids. So as long as that narrative doesn’t change too much, there’s no appetite for it.”
This is refreshing to hear, given all the breakups and divorces that surround the celebrity world. Knowing that, Damon is grateful for how far he’s come. There was once a time when he thought he would never get married and find the same happiness that his brother did. As he once told Parade magazine, “I’m still married, still working, still happy.”
