Minnie Driver Reveals Advice She'd Give Herself After Matt Damon Split
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Originally appeared on E! Online
Minnie Driver is sending her younger self some goodwill.
The Good Will Hunting actress recently shared insight into what it was like seeing her reaction to ex Matt Damon winning the Oscar for writing the 1997 film and revealed what she wishes she could've told herself back then.
"First of all, I want to wrap my arms around that young woman and hug her and go, 'It's all going to be fine, honey. Don't worry,'" Minnie said on the March 14 episode of The Jennifer Hudson Show. "We'd recently broken up. I was nominated, he was nominated, the movie was so amazing, he had a new girlfriend. I was totally heartbroken."
Being in the public eye, she couldn't navigate that heartache with total privacy.
"Anyone who's been heartbroken can understand," she shared, "it's like the last thing you want is everybody having a window in on that and it was so public."
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And while Academy Awards viewers may have witnessed her pain on screen when Matt and Ben Affleck won the original screenplay prize during the 1998 ceremony, Minnie said she'd only recently seen the video of her watching the pair take the stage .
"I hadn't seen the clip—I don't know that I'd ever seen it," the 54-year-old, who was also nominated for her supporting role in Good Will Hunting, explained. "I'd never seen my face—the reaction when they won. And they cut to me 'cause it was a camera right in the face of the poor, young, 25-year-old girl who's about to burst into tears."
So Minnie's comment—in which she recalled being "devastated" and noted Matt had broken up with her only weeks before—was in response to the "raw and vulnerable" moment. And if the Circle of Friends star could go back in time, she'd tell herself everything would be OK.
"From this vantage point—you know, 20/20 vision much later in my life," she added, "I wish I could have told her, ‘Honey, it's cool. Like you can celebrate, and life's gonna be great, and beautiful, and hard and amazing. And you're gonna love again. It'll be fine.'"
Still, Minnie indicated she would have appreciated a little more empathy from the public at the time.
"A heartbreak is private," she noted. "And then if you're an actress, it can be very public. So maybe just us all relating to each other a bit more as humans and we have these similar experiences through different lenses—perhaps we can treat each other all a bit more kindly."
To see more celebrity relationships you may have forgotten about, keep reading.
Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis
They played doomed lovers twice, in 1990's Too Young to Die? and 1993's Kalifornia, but in real life they had a perfectly lovely relationship.
"I still love the woman," Pitt, who was Lewis' date to the 1992 Oscars when she scored a Supporting Actress nomination for Cape Fear, told Vanity Fair in February 1995. "There's some real genius there. I had a great time with her...It was one of the greatest relationships I've ever been in. The problem is, we grow up with this vision that love conquers all, and that's just not so, is it?"
Winona Ryder & Matt Damon
It wasn't just a Gen X fever dream, they really closed out the 20th century as a couple after, legend has it, being introduced by Gwyneth Paltrow (who famously dated Damon's best bud Ben Affleck). They split up in 2000.
After the fact, Damon called Ryder a "great woman" in a 2004 Playboy interview, while Ryder told Black Book in 2009, "Matt couldn't be a greater, nicer guy. I'm really lucky that I'm on good terms with him."
Cameron Diaz & Justin Timberlake
There was something about their chemistry at the 2003 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, where Diaz presented Timberlake with the award for Best Burp—because they dated for almost four years, seriously enough to issue a statement when their relationship ended in 2007, "mutually and as friends, with continued love and respect for one another."
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Madonna & Tupac Shakur
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Meg Tilly & Colin Firth
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Minnie Driver & Matt Damon
The Good Will Hunting stars paired off in real life, too, but they didn't drive off into the sunset together.
"Well, I'm single," Damon said on The Oprah Winfrey Show in January 1998. "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."
The pronouncement was a bit too public for Driver's taste. "It's unfortunate that Matt went on Oprah," she told the LA Times later that year. "It seemed like a good forum for him to announce to the world that we were no longer together, which I found fantastically inappropriate."
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