Matt Damon has revealed that his wife, Luciana Barroso, faced a serious health scare in 2024.
In a new GQ cover story, Damon, 56, discussed missing the 2007 Oscars and his hopes of returning to the ceremony with Oppenheimer in 2024. Those plans changed after Barroso, 50, underwent surgery shortly before the awards, forcing the couple to miss the main event.
“We had this whole scary thing happen where my wife had a brain aneurysm,” Damon said in the interview, published Thursday, October 5. “She’s totally fine, thank God, but [she] had this brain surgery the week before the Oscars.”
Even as she recovered, Barroso made a thoughtful gesture for Damon, and the couple eventually attended an Oscars afterparty.
Matt Damon has spoken about how his wife, Luciana Barroso, supported his mental health while he struggled with a film project that failed to perform as expected. “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, […]
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“But it was the first night she felt good enough to get up and had her energy back. And she surprised me and got a dress and we went out to the afterparty, because she remembered that the last time it happened, I didn’t do it,” he recalled. “And she was like, ‘This time we’re going out.’ And it was pretty f***ing heroic of her to do that and really meaningful.”
Damon was not nominated for his portrayal of Leslie Groves at the 2024 ceremony, although Oppenheimer received 13 nominations and won Best Picture. Ahead of the event, host Jimmy Kimmel joked that Damon was staying away because he had not been nominated for the film.
“What really happened? He couldn’t get a ticket,” Kimmel, 58, quipped to CNN at the time of Damon’s absence. “It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard. He asked if he could come and they told him, ‘Sorry – nominees only.’”
Damon and Barroso have been married since 2005. They met two years earlier, when Barroso was a single mother to her daughter Alexia and working at a Miami bar. The Odyssey star and Barroso later welcomed three more daughters: Isabella, Gia and Stella.
“I just know I think we both feel really, really lucky to have met each other so we don’t take that for granted,” Barroso told Vogue in 2018. “It’s life and marriage, so there’s ups and downs you know, but overall, it’s easy and it’s fun. And he’s such a good dad.”