??Matt Damon put himself in hot water this week after bizarrely admitting that he only recently stopped using the homophobic f-slur. Fellow celebrities are coming out against him. Gossip Cop has the story.
Strange Comment
Damon is in the middle of doing press for the divisive film Stillwater when he relayed a very strange anecdote to The Times Of London. As a follow-up to… no question, in particular, the Talented Mr. Ripley star said his daughter recently pressured him to stop using the “F-slur” all too recently.
He said, “I made a joke, months ago, and got a treatise from my daughter. She left the table. I said, ‘Come on, that’s a joke! I say it in the movie ‘Stuck on You!”” Damon said. “She went to her room and wrote a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous. I said, ‘I retire the f-slur!’ I understood.” This really raised far more questions than answers, the biggest one being why would Damon bring this up at all? It seems like a severely misguided attempt to either win empathy or demonstrate personal growth.
Response Was Swift
Damon was quickly taken to task by his peers. Many on Twitter joked that Damon was trying to steal attention away from best buddy Ben Affleck by causing a scandal. Others remembered a recent incident when Liam Neeson freely admitted that he once longed to kill a “black bastard.” Billy on the Street star Billy Eichner posed another question entirely.
Academy Award-winning director Travon Free added his two cents as well.
Longtime gay rights advocate and beloved Star Trek star George Takei cracked his own joke as well. Many are left wondering if Damon’s just accidentally canceled himself.
Why Volunteer This?
Damon has yet to respond to this backlash, and it’s possible we’ll never really learn why he felt this was something worth sharing. Perhaps he was riding high off his anecdote about passing on Avatar and just wanted to be the center of a story again. Maybe he mixed his own timeline up and said months when he meant years.
Or maybe, just maybe, he needs to do some soul searching on why his daughter asked him to change his ways, and confront his own upbringing and biases in a serious way. We supposed he is trying to use the antidote to highlight how toxic that word is when it used to be so commonplace, but there’s no denying that this is a bad situation purely of Damon’s own making. He chose an odd time and a clumsy way to make the point.
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