Celebrity

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 23: Luciana Damon Damon and Matt Damon pose at the opening night of the n...
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Matt Damon Has His Wife & 4 Daughters' Names Tattooed On His Arm

The actor met his wife Luciana over two decades ago.

by Jen McGuire

Matt Damon has received accolades and awards for so many of his roles, most recently for his parts in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Ben Affleck’s sports drama Air. Which is absolutely amazing, of course, and could well have given him a bit of an ego if he wasn’t careful. Or if he didn’t have his wife and four daughters to keep him super grounded in reality. Here’s what else you need to know about Damon’s family.

Matt Damon met his wife Luciana Barroso when she was bartending in 2003.

Damon was in Miami filming Stuck With You in 2003 when he met Argentinian-born bartender Luciana Barroso. He told Ellen DeGeneres in an interview that it was love at first sight for him. “Literally saw her across a crowded room, literally,” he said. Barosso remembered it differently in a 2018 interview with Vogue Australia. She said that Damon and some of the film crew came in for a drink, and her future husband came behind the bar to get a break from the crowd. “He had started getting recognized and asked for pictures and autographs, and then it got kind of aggressive because people are drinking and stuff,” she explained at the time. “So he came and hid behind the bar … [wanting to] just hang out back there and have a drink. He says, ‘Oh, I saw you and I really wanted to talk to you.’” She let him stay behind the bar, but put him to work serving drinks. They went on to marry in 2005.

Luciana Barroso and Matt Damon at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts in 2004. Brian Babineau/WireImage/Getty Images

Luciana was a single mom when she first met Matt Damon.

When Damon first met Luciana, she was already mom to 4-year-old daughter Alexia. Something she told Vogue Australia meant the world to Damon. “He said, ‘I love that you’re a mum and that’s your priority.’ Some guys might have been different, they might think it’s complicated, but for him it wasn’t. When you meet somebody that you have a connection with, that’s just the person that you have a connection with, all the other stuff — the movie-star part — wasn’t really a factor. It was just Matt, to me he’s just Matt.”

Their daughter Alexia is 24.

Matt Damon is a stepdad.George Pimentel/WireImage/Getty Images

When Damon married Luciana in 2005, he instantly became a stepdad to her daughter Alexia. “Suddenly, it wasn’t just my wife. It was her 4-year-old little girl,” he told Hello! Canada in 2010, per People. “There was never a choice. It was just the way it was, and I was happy for that.” He has maintainted a close relationship with Alexia, even working with her when she had a small cameo in the 2009 film We Bought A Zoo.

Their daughter Isabella is 17.

Luciana Damon, Alexia Barroso, Stella Damon, Isabella Damon, and Matt Damon at the premiere of Air in 2023.Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Matt and Luciana Damon welcomed daughter Isabella in 2006, and becoming a dad to a newborn for the first time really changed his work. The Bourne Ultimatum star told The Daily Express that the director of the film told him he looked “terrible” at the time. “I told him, ‘I’m sorry. I’m awake all night with the baby,’ to which he said, ‘No, it’s really good. She came along just at the right time — she’s really helping your performance.’”

Isabella has become one of her dad’s most hilarious film critics, he admitted in a 2022 CBS Sunday Morning interview when asked if young people watched Good Will Hunting. “Fewer and fewer, you know, younger people don’t know it as much,” he explained, then mentioning one younger person in particular. “You know, my 15-year-old refuses to see it. She doesn’t want to see any movies that I’m in that she thinks might be good.”

Their daughter Gia is 14.

Matt Damon with his daughters Stella, Gia, and Alexia Barroso at the premiere of Oppenheimer in 2023.Pierre Suu/WireImage/Getty Images

Gia Damon was born in 2008 in Miami, and right away she was able to reap the rewards of having a dad in the entertainment business. She visited him on the New Mexico set of True Grit in 2010, where the proud dad told she and sister Isabella took pictures with horses. And Gia even had the chance to go to Africa to meet Nelson Mandela when her dad was filming Invictus. “Lucy and I didn’t even talk to him, we just let him hang out with the kids. He bounced them on his knee,” Damon told People of the meeting. “Isabella and Gia couldn’t take their eyes off him. They just were looking at each other, completely locked on each other the entire time.”

Their daughter Stella is 13.

Alexia Barroso, Luciana Barroso, Stella Damon, Isabella Damon and Matt Damon in 2023. Image Press Agency/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

The arrival of Damon’s youngest daughter Stella in 2010 made them a family of six, and he admitted to People at the time, “It’s been pretty crazy. The baby came a couple of weeks early. It’s our fourth, so we’ve done it before — but it’s a whole new dynamic.” Becoming a dad of four daughters has been pivotal for Damon, who had all of their names tattooed on his arm in 2019 and once even let them dye his hair red to keep them entertained during the pandemic. “I had let the kids dye my hair red. It was their art project basically, and it was clear that we weren’t going back to work,” Damon told his friend Ben Affleck on The Tonight Show in 2021. “Then they decide that I needed a mohawk, so they mohawked me.”

Whatever it takes to keep that many daughters entertained, Damon is willing to do it.