Matt Damon says his wife, Luciana Barroso, had surgery for a brain aneurysm just a week before the 2024 Academy Awards, and still chose to join him at an Oscars after-party as she recovered.
“We had this whole scary thing happen where my wife had a brain aneurysm,” Damon told GQ in a cover interview published Thursday. “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.”
Barroso got dressed and went out with Damon that night, he said, because she remembered an earlier Oscars ceremony he had skipped and didn’t want him to miss another one.
“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,” Damon recalled. “She was like, ‘This time we’re going out.’ And it was pretty f—ing heroic of her to do that and really meaningful.”
The moment echoed one Damon has long regretted. In 2007, Martin Scorsese won his first best director Oscar for “The Departed,” which starred Damon. But Damon wasn’t there. He was in Miami filming second-unit scenes for “The Bourne Ultimatum” and watched the ceremony from bed with Barroso and their infant daughter.
“And I realized in that moment I hadn’t even considered that that could happen,” he said of the film’s eventual best picture win. “And I turned to Lucy and I was like, ‘S—, we should be there!'”
“The Departed” won best picture that night, and Damon said he fielded calls from castmates and studio executives asking why he wasn’t there to celebrate. “I totally blew it,” he admitted.
Damon got another chance at an awards-season payoff with Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” which won best picture at the 2024 Oscars — the same ceremony Barroso attended just days after her surgery.
Family Comes First
Damon has said he and Barroso have generally kept a two-week limit on how long he’s away from home for work. That limit was stretched during filming for Nolan’s 2026 film “The Odyssey,” when Damon spent three and a half weeks away during an early stretch of production.
“It was a sacrifice for them, and they were awesome about it,” he said.
Damon and Barroso married privately in 2005. They have three daughters together — Isabella, 20, Gia, 17, and Stella, 15 — and Damon helped raise Barroso’s daughter Alexia, 27, from a previous relationship.
Damon also credited longtime friend and collaborator Ben Affleck for turning down work that would have pulled him away from his children, saying their priorities have changed since the two broke through together with “Good Will Hunting.”
“I have no right to expect anything like that to happen again,” Damon said of landing another career-defining project. Still, he said he hopes to keep working alongside Affleck. “I just want to make good stuff and definitely keep working with Ben.”
