Emerson Phillips
Minnie Driver and Matt Damon had a brief romance in the late 1990s after starring together as love interests in Good Will Hunting.
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According to Driver, she learned of their breakup when Damon went on Oprah Winfrey’s show and announced he was single.
A fine “how do you do.””I found (it) fantastically inappropriate.” Driver told the Los Angeles Times in July 1997. “It’s unfortunate that Matt went on Oprah; it seemed like a good forum for him to announce to the world that we were no longer together. Of course, he was busy declaring his love for me on David Letterman a month previously.”
Driver, 52, talked about her time with Damon in a story published by Entertainment Tonight.
“That was just a sweet romance that was just a sweet love affair in the center of all of that stuff, but had a combustible ending, which then became the focus,” she said. “Another thing that my parents taught me, was there just isn’t any time to sit around feeling resentful or angry, just have to get on and everybody had a beautiful life.”
The actress explained that her family “loved Matt,” but they “could see that this young man was rocketing really fast and so was I. They were like, ‘This may well end badly for reasons that are to do with all these things coming together in a perfect storm.’”
Ultimately, however, Driver was very gracious and quite understanding of the situation at the time.
She said she knew Damon “couldn’t have helped how famous he became and how his life was being picked over.”
In November 1999, Damon went back on Winfrey’s show to promote The Talented Mr. Ripley and denied that Driver had learned of their breakup from his announcement.
Damon married Luciana Barroso in 2005 – they have three daughters together.
Driver, meanwhile, has been dating filmmaker Addison O’Dea since September 2019. She shares a son with ex Timothy J. Lea.
