Matt Damon recently retired the use of a certain gay slur from his vocabulary, and it’s all thanks to his teenage daughter.
The actor opened up about being dressed down by his daughter in a new interview with The Sunday Times. “The word that my daughter calls the ‘f-slur for a homosexual’ was commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application,” he said before explaining that he’d upset her by using the word in a joke at the dinner table.
“She left the table,” Damon continued, not specifying which of his three daughters protested. “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.”
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In the 2003 comedy the actor references, he stars alongside Greg Kinnear as a pair of fraternal twins conjoined at the hip. His character, Bob, uses the shortened form of the f-slur during a musical montage after the twins are successfully separated.
Meanwhile, Damon’s newest film, Stillwater, hit theaters this weekend after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival last month. Next, Damon will reunite with his best buddy Ben Affleck in the upcoming fantasy epic The Last Duel opposite Adam Driver.
He also joined Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, and the rest of the cast of 2011’s Contagion in the early days of the pandemic to record a PSA on the dangers of COVID-19. (Later in the pandemic, the actor spent months isolated in a remote village on the coast of Ireland after a movie he was filming in Europe was forced to shut down production.)