A Hollywood success story! Matt Damon and Luciana Barroso have been going strong for two decades.
The Oscar winner met Barroso when she was a single mother (daughter Alexia was 4 at the time) working at a bar in Miami in 2003.
“I was working as a bartender in South Beach, and he was shooting a movie there and the crew ended up in the bar one Saturday night,” she recalled to Vogue in 2018. “Matt’s story is that he saw me across the room and there was a light on me. And I’m like, ‘Yeah it was a nightclub — there were lights everywhere!’”
Barroso noted that Damon was recognized by fans in the club and “hid behind my bar” when the crowd got aggressive.
“He says, ‘Oh I saw you and I really wanted to talk to you,’” she continued. “So I put him to work with me! I said, ‘You know, if you’re going to be back here, you can’t just be standing there!’ He had trained as a bartender for a film years before, so he started making drinks. And he made me a ton of money in tips that night, because of course everyone wanted to go and see him. It turned into a really fun night and then 15 years later here we are!”
Barroso and Damon wed in 2005 after two years of dating and added three more daughters — Isabella, Gia and Stella — to their family.
“The thing for us has always been that just we try really hard to constantly talk about self-esteem and compassion, and hope that will carry on,” Barroso told the magazine. “We’re not always going to be able to be there when they have to make critical decisions in their life, so I just hope that they know how to respect themselves and respect others and to not hold back and do what they want to do, but always have in mind the effect on another human being. I want them to feel like they can do anything and everything they want to do, to just have to go for it and try and don’t let anything stand in their way but not at the cost of somebody else.”
The Jason Bourne star, for his part, has made it clear he’s a proud dad over the years — even if his kids aren’t impressed with his films.
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“[Isabella] doesn’t want to see any movies that I’m in that she thinks might be good. She just likes to give me s—t,” Damon told CBS Sunday Morning in July 2021, noting she doesn’t want to watch Good Will Hunting. “My daughter said, ‘Hey remember that movie you did, The Wall?’ I said, ‘It was called The Great Wall.’ She goes, ‘Dad, there was nothing great about that movie!’ She keeps my feet firmly on the ground.”
Scroll through for Damon and Barroso’s relationship timeline:
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