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Matt Damon revealed in a newGQ magazine cover story that his wife, Luciana, suffered a brain aneurysm in early 2024 and went into surgery just one week before the 96th Academy Awards, where the Damon-starring “Oppenheimer”
swept the night with Oscars for best picture, director (Christopher Nolan), actor (Cillian Murphy), supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr.) and more. The couple skipped the ceremony as a result but did hit the town for an after party, mainly because Damon’s wife felt guilty about skipping the Oscars years prior when “The Departed” won best picture and more.
“I remember I was shooting second unit for ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ during that Oscars [where ‘The Departed’ won], so I didn’t go,” Damon said. “I was living in Miami at the time, and I had an infant. [My wife] Lucy and I were laying in bed watching it and so nervous for Marty. And then when he won, I was jumping up and down in the bedroom and I remember being really excited. And then the next category was best picture, and ‘The Departed’ won. And I realized in that moment I hadn’t even considered that that could happen. And I turned to Lucy and I was like, ‘Shit, we should be there!’ And then the next few weeks, I got all these calls from all the cast and the studio, like, ‘Hey, where were you, man?’ I totally blew it.”
“The next time that that happened was on ‘Oppenheimer’ and we had this whole scary thing happen where my wife had a brain aneurysm,” the actor continued. “She’s totally fine, thank God, but [she] had this brain surgery the week before the Oscars. But it was the first night she felt good enough to get up and had her energy back. And she surprised me and got a dress and we went out to the after-party, because she remembered that the last time it happened, I didn’t do it. And she was like, ‘This time we’re going out.’ And it was pretty fucking heroic of her to do that and really meaningful.”
While “The Departed” and “Oppenheimer” won big on Oscars night, Damon was not nominated for supporting actor for either picture. But he doesn’t mind the snubs.
“It’s not something you can control. You got to just do the work, and that’s got to be the reward,” Damon told GQ. “Because it’s like, then if you don’t win, do you feel bad about something that was really positive? Don’t turn this into something bad. It’s a tricky one. I always think about old movies when I look at them and it says, ‘So-and-so won an Oscar, so-and-so didn’t.’ You’re judging it in a totally different way. It’s not attached to that anymore.”
Damon added, “The real way they should do them, really, is 20 or 25 years later. You’ll have a really good idea of which movies really endured and really still matter to you. There can be hype in the moment, or it can be a zeitgeist thing, but it doesn’t hold up. The goal for me is to make as many of those movies that are around 20 years later. That’s a cool thing. People come up [to me] about ‘Good Will Hunting’ and I realize they weren’t born when the movie came out. It’s just very cool for Ben and me to have a new generation of people actually see it.”
Even if awards don’t ultimately matter, Damon will be back in the throes of awards season with Christopher Nolan’s record-breaking blockbuster “The Odyssey.” Damon is widely expected to land a nomination for best actor and some view him as the frontrunner to win. The same goes for Nolan for best director and the movie for best picture.
Read Damon’s full GQ cover story here.
