When Matt Damon was thinking about taking on a tough role in Werner Herzog’s war movie ‘Rescue Dawn‘, he did something a lot of big stars might not think to do. He called his mom. That phone call with his mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, who was a professor of early childhood education at Lesley University, ended up changing more than just his career. It changed his whole life.
“I remember talking to my mother, and my mother said ‘You don’t always have to go into the jungle and lose a bunch of weight, you’re allowed to have fun,‘” Damon said at a press conference, according to multiple reports.
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It was just how Damon’s mom talked. She was never impressed by fame. When she first saw her son in a fancy magazine, she was not happy and called him “just a cog in the capitalist system.” She had spent years as a professor and, as Damon put it, she would not read anything “if it’s not The Nation.”
Her practical advice saved Damon from that really tough Herzog film. Christian Bale ended up taking the part instead, and he had to eat live maggots, fight with snakes, and drop a lot of weight. In the end, ‘Rescue Dawn‘ only made about 7.2 million dollars at the box office. It got good reviews but did not do well financially.
So Damon listened to his mother and chose a Farrelly Brothers comedy called ‘Stuck on You‘, which was about conjoined twins. That movie gave him something way more valuable than money. “I did the Farrelly Brothers movie and that was where I met my wife,” Damon said. “Four kids later, that was a pretty fateful decision.”
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Damon and his wife met in 2003 at a bar in Miami while he was filming. “I literally saw her across a crowded room, literally,” Damon told Ellen DeGeneres in 2011. The woman was Luciana Barroso, an Argentinian bartender who later became his wife.
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Barroso remembers that night a little differently, and she has a good sense of humor about it. When Damon came behind the bar to get away from some pushy fans, she put him to work. “He had trained as a bartender for a film years before, so he started making drinks. And he made me a ton of money in tips that night,” she told Vogue Australia in 2018.
When Damon asked her to hang out with his friends after her shift, she said no because she had a four-year-old daughter at home. She said that was “one of the things he loved, that I had a daughter.“
Matt Damon Says Listening to His Mother Was the Best Decision of His Life
Damon has said that choosing to follow his mom’s advice was one of the biggest decisions of his life. “I’d say one of the biggest ones, there was the Werner Herzog movie called Rescue Dawn that Christian Bale did, and Werner and I were talking about that about me possibly playing that role,” he said. “I was really strongly considering it, and instead I met with the Farrelly Brothers.”
That one choice, which came from his mother simply reminding him that he was “allowed to have fun,” led to a marriage that has now lasted more than 20 years. “Eight years and four kids later, that’s my life,” Damon said. “I don’t know how else our paths would’ve crossed if that didn’t happen.”
It seems Nancy Carlsson-Paige knew what she was talking about. She had actually predicted that her son would be an actor when he was just two years old. “She could see from the way we played and what we were drawn to,” Damon said. Even after becoming a huge star, he never stopped listening to her.
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