Minnie Driver was “devastated” after Matt Damon brought a new girlfriend to the 1998 Oscars, weeks after their breakup.
Driver and Damon starred together in “Good Will Hunting,” which won the Academy Award for best original screenplay that year. The actress recently responded to a resurfaced clip from Damon and Ben Affleck’s acceptance speech that showed her seemingly unhappy reaction.
“My face,” she commented with laughing emojis and a heart, via Comments by Celebs.
“Matt had ended our relationship a few weeks before this, and was at the Oscars with his new gf… I was devastated,” she wrote in response to a user who commented that she looked sad. “Wish I could have celebrated more as it was an amazing moment for all of us, and for this wonderful film!”
Minnie Driver was “devastated” after Matt Damon brought his new girlfriend to the 1998 Oscars. (Getty Images)
A representative for Damon did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Driver and Damon met on the set of “Good Will Hunting” in 1997. While the two got on really well, they were both becoming more famous as the movie prepared to hit the awards circuit.
“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,” Driver told Entertainment Tonight in 2022. “They were like, ‘This may well end badly for reasons that are to do with all these things coming together in a perfect storm.'”
Minnie Driver met Matt Damon on the set of “Good Will Hunting,” which also starred Ben Affleck. (Getty Images)
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During an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in January 1998, Damon revealed he and Driver had split. Driver hinted that’s when she found out they had broken up.
She told the Los Angeles Times, “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. Of course, he was busy declaring his love for me on David Letterman a month previously.”
Driver struggled to deal with the split in the public eye.
“I don’t care who you are, that is agony, and it’s like a strange, surreal dream,” she told “Entertainment Tonight” while recalling reading about her own split in the tabloids. “But I know he didn’t put that picture there. It’s so tricky because it’s not deliberate. He couldn’t have helped how famous he became and how his life was being picked over in the same way that mine was.”
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Matt Damon and Minnie Driver broke up weeks before the awards season began for “Good Will Hunting.” (Getty Images)
The public interest in Damon and Driver’s breakup continued with the Oscars appearance.
“There’s a guy who’d been sent, the cameraman at the Academy Awards. He’d literally been told to stay on me, and he was so in my grill. He was like a wildlife photographer waiting for the kill,” she told the outlet in 2022. “He was just waiting for the moment that I was going to break or something was going to happen or I was going to get up and scream.”
Minnie Driver and Matt Damon in 1997. (Getty Images)
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Driver has been romantically linked to filmmaker Addison O’Dea since 2019. The actress also has a son, Henry.
Damon has been married to Luciana Barroso since 2005.
