Matt Damon is so surrounded by women in his life that it takes a visiting nephew making a comment about the all-female vibe for him to notice.
“I am quite regularly the only man in a room, and I don’t even think about it anymore,” says Damon, who has three daughters – Isabella, 15, Gia, 12, and Stella, 10 – with wife Luciana Barroso, as well as 23-year-old stepdaughter Alexia.
As a father, Damon could relate deeply to playing a dad doing his best in a bad situation in director Tom McCarthy’s thriller “Stillwater” (in theaters now). His character, Bill Baker, is a former Oklahoma oil roughneck who, after struggling with drugs and alcohol in his past, desperately tries to help his estranged daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin).
Convicted of murdering her girlfriend in Marseille, France, and serving a nine-year sentence, Allison always claimed innocence and now has a possible lead on the actual killer. Bill moves overseas to help and strikes up a relationship with theater actress Virginie (Camille Cottin) and her 8-year-old daughter, Maya (Lilou Siauvaud).
Damon says he found it “very easy” to access the pain and grief Bill feels as a parent: “Imagine carrying the guilt and shame of years of addiction and feeling like you failed that person and then feeling responsible for where they find themselves in their life. That would be a nightmare scenario.”
As hard as Bill tries, he can’t help messing up, and that’s also relatable for Damon, 50….
