Minnie Driver says her ‘sweet romance’ with Matt Damon had a ‘combustible ending’

‘I tell that story with love’ actress told Entertainment Tonight

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Minnie Driver has opened up about her brief relationship during the ‘90s with Matt Damon and revealed that while it was a “sweet love affair,” it had a rough “ending”.

Driver reflected on her 1997 to 1998 romance with Damon during a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, where she noted that while her family loved Damon, they thought that she and him were “rocketing really fast” and worried that the relationship would “end badly”.

“My family loved Matt - it wasn’t that. It was that they could see that this young man was rocketing really fast and so was I, and when you’re young, it’s pretty hard to keep your head on straight and to maintain a grounded sense of deportment,” she explained.

“They were like, ‘This may well end badly for reasons that are to do with all these things coming together in a perfect storm,’” she added.

The 52-year-old actor acknowledged that when she and Damon broke up, it was very public, so seeing that split in the tabloids was like “a strange, surreal dream”.

“It’s so tricky, because it’s not deliberate,” she said. “He couldn’t have helped how famous he became and how his life was being picked over, in the same way that mine was.”

She then detailed an experience where she went to the supermarket with her friend and saw her breakup being publicised in a magazine. Driver said that when they saw this, her friend felt like they were “in a movie,” although the Cinderella star was feeling “heartbroken”.

“My friend, Alexandra was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe this is happening, like, I feel like we’re in a movie. I would totally watch this movie, even though I know you’re super heartbroken, but this is really weird,’” she explained.

Despite their messy split, Driver said that she still views her relationship as a “sweet romance” with a “combustible ending” and noted that she doesn’t feel “resentful” towards it.

“I tell that story with love, because that was just a sweet romance that was just a sweet love affair in the centre of all of that stuff, but had a combustible ending, which then became the focus,” the singer added. “Another thing that my parents taught me was there just isn’t any time to sit around feeling resentful or angry, just have to get on and everybody had a beautiful life.”

The couple back in the ‘90s, as they worked together on Good Will Hunting. When appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1997, the Jason Bourne star publicly announced that he and Driver had gone their separate ways.

However, while speaking to theLA Times in 1998, Driver said that she thought it was “fantastically inappropriate” of Damon to announce their split on television.

“It’s unfortunate that Matt went on Oprah, it seemed like a good forum for him to announce to the world that we were no longer together, which I found fantastically inappropriate,” she said. “Of course, he was busy declaring his love for me on David Letterman a month previously.”

As time has passed since their relationship ended, Driver recently expressed how she and Damon are cordial with each other. While appearing on the podcast Keep It! podcast last September, Driver revealed that she had recently run into Damon and how “reassuring” it was to talk to him about his life and family.

“I did see Matt Damon on the beach and I had not had a conversation with him, seriously, since we made [Good Will Hunting],” she explained. “That was last summer and it was actually very nice to see him, and his kids, and his wife and it all felt quite middle-aged actually, which was reassuring.”

Damon and his wife, Luciana Barroso, share three children: Isabella, 15, Gia, 13, and Stella, 11. Driver has been dating Addison O’Dea since 2019 and shares her 13-year-old son Henry with her ex, Timothy J Lea.