Ahh, Matt Damon. He’s spent the last couple of days getting his ass kicked by everyone from Alyssa Milano to Minnie Driver for his blasé comments on #MeToo, but he’s coming back for another bite at the apple. Yessir! Matt Damon has himself some fresh hot takes on sexual harassment in Hollywood, and he is here to bequeath them unto you.
Speaking to Business Insider, Damon first made clear that whether or not an actor has been accused of sexual misconduct is already part of his calculus in determining whether he’ll work with them. “That always went into my thinking,” Damon said. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to work with somebody who – life’s too short for that.”
Great! But then he regrettably kept talking. “But the question of if somebody had allegations against them, you know, it would be a case-by-case basis. You go, ‘What’s the story here?’”
Ahh, there we go. Case-by-case basis, got it. Then Damon shouted out the true heroes in this saga: the noble warriors of Hollywood who haven’t committed sexual harassment or assault.
We’re in this watershed moment and it’s great, but I think one thing that’s not being talked about is there are a whole shitload of guys — the preponderance of men I’ve worked with — who don’t do this kind of thing and whose lives aren’t going to be affected.
Of course, Damon seems to be forgetting that he himself admitted he knew his old collaborator and producer Harvey Weinstein had sexually harassed Gwyneth Paltrow. In his own words:
I knew the story about Gwyneth from Ben [Affleck] because he was with her after Brad [Pitt]. But I was working with Gwyneth, with Harvey, on [The Talented Mr. Ripley] … I never talked to Gwyneth about it. Ben told me, but I knew that they had come to whatever agreement or understanding they had come to.
Well, there are obviously plenty of blokes in Hollywood who don’t participate in sexual harassment. But if they’re also standing idly by, aware that harassment is happening in their orbit and only talking about it when the shit really hits the fan, then we probably don’t need to applaud them. You can argue ’til the cows come home about their degree of culpability, but they haven’t really earned a pat on the back.
“If I have to sign a sexual harassment thing, I don’t care,” Damon also said in the interview, referring to God knows what. “I’ll sign it.”
I don’t know what a ‘sexual harassment thing’ is or why he would be signing it, but there you go. You do you, Matty.
