Minnie Driver and Matt Damon were once one of Hollywood’s hottest couples, falling in love while filming the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting. In her new book, Driver revealed details about the couple’s complicated relationship.
Damon And Driver’s Very Public Split
Driver and Damon started dating while they filmed Good Will Hunting, with their on-screen characters falling in love as well. In her book, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays, Driver revealed that her family was not 100% sold on the idea of her relationship with Damon.
“My family loved Matt. It wasn’t that,” she explained. “It was that they could see that this young man was rocketing really fast and so was I. And when you’re young, it’s pretty hard to keep your head on straight and to maintain a grounded sense of deportment. They were like, ‘This may well end badly for reasons that are to do with all these things coming together in a perfect storm.'”
In 1998, the couple had an extremely messy breakup. Damon announced the split while appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show, saying, “Well, I’m single. I was with Minnie for a while, but we’re not really romantically involved anymore. We’re just really good friends, and I love her dearly….I care about her a lot. We care about each other a lot. It wasn’t meant to be, you know? And if it’s not meant to be, then it’s not meant to be.”
A few months later, Driver got her chance to weigh in on how the breakup went down during an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “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, which I found fantastically inappropriate,” Driver said. “Of course, he was busy declaring his love for me on David Letterman a month previously.”
Damon fired back in another Oprah interview, saying that Driver knew they had broken up before he publicly talked about it on the show. This public war of words made for lots of tabloid headlines.
Driver Looks Back On ‘Sweet Love Affair’
“I don’t care who you are, that is agony and it’s like a strange, surreal dream,” Driver told ET. “It’s so tricky because it’s not deliberate, he couldn’t have helped how famous he became and how his life was being picked over in the same way that mine was.”
The two have since moved on—Damon with his wife Luciana Barroso, Driver with her partner Addison O’Dea—and Driver now looks back on their time together fondly. “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 explained. “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.”
While Damon and Driver’s breakup was complicated and full of he said, she said-s, it’s nice to know that the actress doesn’t hold any grudges against Damon for how it all went down.
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