Minnie Driver has revealed the advice she would give her 25-year-old self after her devastating divorce from Matt Damon in 1998.
The actress, now 54, who looked famous as she watched her ex accept an Oscar for their 1998 film Good Will Hunting, discussed her heartbreak when she appeared on Thursday’s episode of The Jennifer Hudson Show.
After Hudson noted that Driver’s phrase “made a lot of headlines,” the British star said, “I wish I could have said to her, ‘Honey, it’s cool, you can celebrate and life will be amazing and beautiful and hard and be great.
“You’re going to fall in love again, it’s going to be okay.”
Driver and Damon began a relationship after starring as love interests in the film, but then went their separate ways their year-long whirlwind romance in 1998.
Minnie Driver has revealed the advice she would give her 25-year-old self after her devastating divorce from Matt Damon in 1998 (pictured 1997)
The actress, now 54, who looked famous as she watched her ex accept an Oscar for their 1998 film Good Will Hunting, discussed her heartbreak when she appeared on Thursday’s episode of The Jennifer Hudson Show.
By the time the Oscars were presented, Damon had already moved in with a new girlfriend who attended the ceremony with him.
In October, a video surfaced of Driver’s heartbroken expression at the Oscars
Damon and Ben Affleck accepted the Oscar for best original screenplay and showed a glimpse of Driver glumly looking at her co-stars as Affleck shouted her out in their speech.
After a fan commented that Driver looked “so sad” at the ceremony, the actress jumped to the comments section to explain her appearance.
‘Matt had ended our relationship a few weeks earlier and was at the Oscars with his new girlfriend… I was devastated. I wish I could have celebrated more, because it was a great moment for all of us, and for this beautiful film!’ Driver commented.
The mother of one driver has been in a relationship with Addison O’Dea since 2019. Damon, 53, has been married to Luciana Bozán since 2005 and the couple share three daughters.
The world learned that Damon and Driver called it quits after the actor revealed their breakup on The Oprah Winfrey Show, saying, “Well, I’m single. I was with Minnie for a while, but we don’t really have a romantic relationship anymore, we’re just really good friends. I love her dearly.’
‘I care about her a lot. We care about each other a lot. It wasn’t meant to be, and if it wasn’t meant to be, then it wasn’t meant to be.’
Damon and Driver starred in their critically acclaimed film Good Will Hunting and sparked a real-life romance
Damon and Ben Affleck were seen accepting the Oscar for best original screenplay, showing a glimpse of Driver glumly looking at her co-stars as Affleck shouted her out in their speech.
After a fan commented that Driver looked “so sad” at the ceremony, the actress jumped to the comments section to explain her appearance. “Matt had ended our relationship a few weeks earlier and was at the Oscars with his new girlfriend… I was devastated.”
Driver hit back in a subsequent interview with the Los Angeles Times: ‘It’s a shame 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 extremely inappropriate.”
“Of course, he was busy declaring his love for me to David Letterman a month earlier,” she said.
In 2022, the actress appeared on ITV’s This Morning, where she told Phillip Schofield and Rochelle Humes about her public split from Matt: “It was reported dramatically, but I wouldn’t change a second of it.”
Minnie spoke to Chris Evans on the Sky Breakfast Show, where she talked about her time in Hollywood and their romance during that time.
She said: ‘Matt Damon was just a sweet, talented, wonderful person who was also very young and rose to fame very quickly. And people don’t always behave well in situations where you are under pressure.
“It was a really sweet romance that we had. And I really look back on it with so much fondness, no matter how it turned out. It was just kind of dramatic and tabloid-y and really incredible.”
Damon, 53, has been married to Luciana Bozán since 2005 and the couple have three daughters – he attended the Vanity Fair Oscar party on Sunday where Driver was also in attendance
Driver has been in a relationship with Addison O’Dea since 2019
She recalled what it was like to find out he was dating other people through the press: “At the time, it was weird walking down the aisle of the supermarket with magazine covers in stereo of him making out with his new girlfriend after we had agreed. split up.
‘We really liked each other, we were really good friends at that time. And they let us improvise a lot, there was a lot of it real, the way we spoke to each other.”
The actress cemented her fame with 1997’s Good Will Hunting, which earned her an Academy Award nomination.
Minnie also spoke about romance while promoting her memoir Managing Expectations last year TODAY.
The actress wrote that her mother advised her to love Damon “loosely,” but Driver insisted that her parents were big fans of the actor.
“They loved Matt,” Minnie said on the show. “It was really with an actor who was going up at a rate of knots, just like me, and it’s super combustible, as you know, teacher Phil Hook would say.
“That was just a recipe for not necessarily disaster, but flammability and everyone moving at the speed of knots. They wanted me to just calm down and not fall in love, but also become famous.”