Next year is when Matt Damon will likely be the talk of the town in the Best Leading Actor Oscar race. His role as Ulysses in The Odyssey that Christopher Nolan filmed seems like a safe place in the category’s shortlist of nominees. After all, the Hollywood Academy loves to award the grand prize to its stars at any point in their careers, especially since It’s been almost 30 years since he began the path that would make him one of his greatest legends. …this first important role in We must save Private Ryan— and who already has a statuette to his credit, but only that for best original screenplay, as well as three other nominations, including two for his performances in Invictus And The Martian.
The most curious thing about the actor, born in October 1970 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is that despite the status he achieved throughout this period, his private life made very little headlines and he was never in the media spotlight. Something which, on the other hand, means for him something apparently very simple: having found the love of his life. Her name is Luciana Damon, although when he met her her name was Luciana Bozán Barroso, the person with whom you entered into a marriage and who has just celebrated their porcelain wedding anniversary. That’s 20 years together.
It all started with stuck to youa comedy he was filming in 2003 with Greg Kinnear and Eva Mendes. At one point during filming, the actor went to a restaurant in Miami Beach, and there, a friendly waitress would change his life forever. “We were driving stuck to you with Eva Mendes on a beach in Miami when a group of fans surrounded me. They chased me like a swarm of wasps and I was able to escape. But, hiding behind the bar counter, she appeared, looked at me and asked: What are you doing here? Damon explained in an interview how this cover-up would lead to their relationship.
Because in fact it wasn’t the first time they had seen each other, since Matt had been there during other breaks on the set, but they hadn’t spoken until then. And as fortune would have it, they were both open to love at that moment. She would surely tell him that she had just turned 24 – he was 32 – and that she was already the mother of a 4-year-old little girl. whom he had named Alexia and who had just divorced, as his parents had also done. He also spoke to him about how he had grown up in Argentina and how his grandmother, precisely because of the separation of his parents, had been someone crucial in his life. Damon, who already had an Oscar and who began his most famous saga in 2002 with The Bourne Affairfell exhausted.
Partly because his previous relationships, with other actresses, were not at all lasting. Previously in Argentina, Matt Damon dated his co-star in 1996 and 1997. The hunt for indomitable will Minnie Driver, and from 1998 to the mid-2000s, he was in a relationship with Winona Ryder. However, with Luciana it was different: the fact of being able to keep a reserved profile and away from the media and that she was not famous was understood by the press more as an idyll than as something lasting, especially when it was learned that she had been a waitress.
But little by little, the young woman accompanies him to events and on the red carpets and the surprise arrives in 2005. At the end of that year, more precisely on December 9, during an intimate ceremony and with little Alexia, then aged 7, as a witness, Matt Damon and Luciana Barroso answered “yes.” And the girls started to arrive. In fact, in the marriage, the former waitress was already pregnant, because Isabella was born in June 2006. Then came the turn of Gia, whom they welcomed in August 2008 and, finally, Stella, the youngest, who came into the world in October 2010.
Even though Damon ended up becoming Alexia’s legal stepfather by adopting her, the young woman, after studying in New York, ended up settling in Argentina. But that doesn’t mean she continues to be a part of both of their lives — although they initially lived in Miami, they eventually moved to Los Angeles in 2012 — or that the actor doesn’t love her like his other daughters. As proof, his tattoo on his right arm, where we can read the names of his four daughters and that of his wife. It’s also quite curious how they all have a huge physical resemblance to their mother.
The family travels frequently to South America and, in particular, to Luciana’s native country. On one such getaway, to Costa Rica, around 2014, the family ended up adopting a wild jungle cat, which became the family pet. However, as noted in late show by Stephen Colbert in 2024, a brain tumor was detected in the animal. Even though it looked like they were going to sacrifice him, they ultimately opted for a drastic option: giving him a truly illogical amount of steroids and, laughing, the performer said it worked wonders.
These little anecdotes show that, even if it does not make the headlines, their marriage is one of the most stable and solid in the Mecca of cinema and that their love is still more alive than ever, with the same alchemy as the day they met. That is to say, if he were truly a modern Ulysses, Matt Damon would sail all the seas to return to his Penelope, an Argentinian waitress named Luciana Bozán Barroso.
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