Matt Damon Admits to Using Homophobic Slurs
by EG
Stillwater star Matt Damon admitted in a recent interview that he used a particular homophobic slur as recently as a few months. He says he doesn't do it anymore because his daughter wrote a "treatise" that explained to him that it wasn't nice. No word on why he hadn't figured it out for himself long before that. Read on for details.
Matt Damon has revealed that he stopped using what his daughter calls the “f-slur for a homosexual,” after a recent joke from the actor prompted his daughter to write “a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous.”
In an interview with the U.K.’s Sunday Times published today, Damon recalls how the offensive term for gay people was “commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application.”
But when he used the term in a joke “months ago,” she made him see that he made a mistake.
“I made a joke, months ago, and got a treatise from my daughter. She left the table,” Damon recalls. “I said, ‘Come on, that’s a joke! I say it in the movie Stuck on You!’ 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.”
The anecdote came up as Damon, currently starring in the Tom McCarthy-directed thriller Stillwater, talks about changes in modern masculinity, and he looks back on comments he made about sexual misconduct claims against Harvey Weinstein.
After saying, “As the father of four daughters, this is the kind of sexual predation that keeps me up at night,” he was criticized, with commentators saying anyone, regardless of whether you are a father of daughters, should be offended.
Speaking to the Sunday Times, Damon says, “I understand. It’s a fair point. Anybody should be offended by that behavior.”
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.