Minnie Driver’s family saved her life! After Driver and Matt Damon portrayed lovers in Good Will Hunting, almost two decades ago, they turned fiction into reality immediately after they ended filming. However, like many high-profile relationships in Hollywood, they faced challenges as well, thanks to the intense media scrutiny they received back then. This attention ultimately led to their breakup, and they went their separate ways.
In an Entertainment Tonight interview, the actress revealed the advice shared by her family and her father that helped her overcome everything and stand on her own feet.
This Advice Changed Minnie Driver’s Life Post-breakup With Matt Damon
In a 2022 interview with Entertainment Tonight, actress Minnie Driver reminisced about her time with Matt Damon while promoting her book, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays. It is no secret that the duo was the hot topic and pretty much the front-page headline of every magazine back in the day.
The relentless media attention made it excessively difficult for them to exist peacefully. Driver stated that although her family approved of Matt Damon, the Oscar winner’s exponential growth proved to be a worrisome matter for Driver’s family, as they were concerned about her safety and sanity. She stated,
“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. They were like, ‘This may well end badly for reasons that are to do with all these things coming together in a perfect storm.'”
Although the exact reason for their breakup was never revealed by the ex-couple, the excessive media scrutiny involving their every move was deemed one speculated reason for their breakup. The worries of the Driver family are also now credited for the split-up. The actress remembers, her father being a constant source of support for her as she stated,
“It feels like a movie in itself, which it was and it was presented in that way,–but now, I look back and it just feels really overly dramatic and kind of funny—brutal, but funny.”
Thus, although it looked like a huge deal back in the day, the actress now claims that the constant support of her family, especially her father, helped her through it all. Now, when she looks back, she sees how blown out of proportion it was.
Minnie Driver Didn’t Like How Matt Damon Shared the News With the World
After almost dating for a year, the two lovers, Minnie Driver and Matt Damon, decided to go their separate ways in 1998. The actor decided to break the news to the public on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Although it was a relief, the actor didn’t actually break up with Driver on the show, as speculated by many. She still wasn’t pleased by the way Damon decided to announce the news to the public. While on the show, Damon stated (via E!),
“Well, I’m single,–I was with Minnie for a while, but we’re not really romantically involved anymore. We’re just really good friends, and I love her dearly….I care about her a lot. We care about each other a lot. It wasn’t meant to be, you know? And if it’s not meant to be, then it’s not meant to be.”
Thus, the actress decided to voice her opinions, on LA Times, as she stated,
“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.”
Thus, although it was never meant to be, the actress feels they were robbed of a real chance to test their compatibility, as their short-lived relationship became the talk of the town even after they broke up, which she finds a bit unfair.
