BORN TO DO IT
special thanks to the Martinez hotel, Cannes, and Riva Yachts
Perhaps worthy of note is the fact that Matt Damon is credited in at least one film per year since 1995.
Matt Damon operates from a place of joy — his words — and it is pretty infectious. There is but a small handful of actors who are known for their work and their capacity to inspire cheerfulness and good vibes outside of their métier. Tom Hanks is one, for example, and Damon is another. While his ‘status’ cannot be located on the common celebritycultural framework — he is not on social media, is not one half of a celebrity couple, nor does he court media attention — Damon has nevertheless remained one of the most prominent men on the planet and certainly one of the most likeable. We find him in good spirits at the Cannes Film Festival, where he is promoting his latest movie, Stillwater, and taking part in the first major congregation of Hollywood since 2019. The industry ground to a halt for a good 12 months, with delays in releases and cinemas closed, but the display of high glamour on the Riviera is optimism at its chicest. Now that films are again being released to a more reliable schedule, the optimism feels well founded, and where there’s optimism you can often find the gravitational pull towards Matt Damon.
He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a city just across the Charles River from Boston. His mother was a professor of early childhood education and his father was a stockbroker. They divorced when he was two years old but didn’t let that blanket his upbringing with trauma. “I had two really loving parents; they were divorced but they were both very involved in my life,” he tells . Where some children’s dysfunctional home life can hamper potential at school, the efforts of his parents were not in vain: Matt thrived academically and picked up, as he puts it, “a massive amount of social capital — we didn’t have a lot of money but I had the more important stuff, really incredible teachers,
