Even Matt Damon and his wife of 18 years can benefit from couples’ therapy! In a new interview, the Air star admitted it was through therapy that he negotiated his role in the epic biopic Oppenheimer with wife Luciana Barroso. “I had — not to get too personal — negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off,” he told Entertainment Weekly during a cast round table on Monday, July 17.
“I had been in Interstellar, and then Chris [Nolan] put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation, but I actually negotiated in couples therapy — this is a true story — the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called. This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you. He just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household.”
Matt, 52, has previously admitted that sometimes movies go longer than planned, putting a kink in would-be expectations from family members. “Without naming any particular movies … sometimes you find yourself in a movie that you know, perhaps, might not be what you had hoped it would be, and you’re still making it,” the dad of four said during an on-camera interview on Jake’s Takes. “And I remember halfway through production and you’ve still got months to go and you’ve taken your family somewhere, you know, and you’ve inconvenienced them, and I remember my wife pulling me up because I fell into a depression about like, what have I done?”
It seems to have worked out regardless, with a large and happy family resulting. The longtime couple, who married almost two decades ago in 2005 after meeting in a bar and dating for two years, now share four beautiful daughters — Alexia, 24, Isabella, 17, Gia, 14, and Stella, 12.