Like bloody CLOCKWORK, Matt Damon has walked back his original comments to The Sunday Times, in which he said that he still used the f-slur until very recently.
Speaking to the newspaper, Damon recalled a time when he said the word during a conversation with his daughter at the dinner table.
“The word that my daughter calls the ‘f-slur for a homosexual’ was commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application,” Damon told The Times.
“I made a joke, months ago, and got a treatise from my daughter. She left the table. I said, ‘Come on, that’s a joke! I say it in the movie Stuck on You!’,” he continued, referencing the film in which he starred as a conjoined twin alongside Greg Kinnear, 18 years ago.
“She went to her room and wrote a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous. I said, ‘I retire the f-slur!’ I understood.”
This, uh, did not go down well on the internet and soon, Damon was being absolutely dragged across the coals for thinking the f-slur was funny in this day and age.
As you can imagine, the actor is now in complete damage control mode. But instead of owning up to his fuck-up, Damon has chosen to just… pull a 180.
In a statement obtained by Variety, Damon said that the discussion with his daughter had been an example of him attempting to contextualise “the progress that has been made – though by no means completed.”
Damon again explained that growing up, he heard the slur used on the street before he even knew what it meant.
“I explained that the word was used constantly and casually and even a line of dialogue in a movie of mine as recently as 2003,” the actor said.
He then praised his daughter for recognising that this is Not Good, and lauded her “passion, values and desire for social justice.”
But wait, there’s more.
“I have never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening. I do not use slurs of any kind,” he continued.
“I have learned that eradicating prejudice requires active movement toward justice rather than finding passive comfort in imagining myself ‘one of the good guys’. And given that open hostility against the LGBTQ+ community is still not uncommon, I understand why my statement led many to assume the worst. To be as clear as I can be, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”
Matt, mate.
