Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are sharing their thoughts on cancel culture in Hollywood.
While promoting their new movie, The Rip, the Oscar winners stopped by the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where the host brought up the “idea that one thing you said or one thing you did, and now we’re going to exaggerate that to the fullest extent and cast you out of civilization for life.”
Damon, who agreed with Joe Rogan that cancel culture is a crazy concept, went on to suggest that some people in the industry would probably have preferred to go to prison rather than face lifetime public scrutiny.
“I bet some of those people would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months or whatever, and then come out and say, ‘I paid my debt. Like, we’re done. Like, can we be done?’ The thing about that getting kind of excoriated, publicly like that, it just never ends. And it will just follow you to the grave,” the Oppenheimer actor said.
Affleck went on to compare cancel culture to the “kind of sixth-grade instinct” to point fingers and be like, ‘Oh, he’s in trouble.’”
“Humans have dark, fucked up instincts too sometimes to isolate people or get joy out of someone else’s… they’re in trouble, because maybe because part of it is saying, ‘Hey, it’s not me.’ So if you can point the finger, everyone’s looking over there, we feel safer, you know?” he continued.
“And to take any forgiveness out of it is a really fucked up thing because then it makes it impossible to actually go, ‘All right, yeah, I did that. That was wrong. I get it.’ Because it doesn’t matter; once you’ve said you’ve done it, you become like an outcast,” Affleck added. “And I don’t think anybody wants to think the sum total of who you are is your worst moment.”
Damon knows a bit about what it’s like to be at the center of controversy, as he faced backlash in 2021 when he told the U.K.’s Sunday Times that he only stopped using the “f-slur for a homosexual” months prior after his daughter wrote him “a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous.”
The actor later clarified in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter that he has never used the slur personally. “I have never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening,” Damon wrote in part. “I do not use slurs of any kind. I have learned that eradicating prejudice requires active movement toward justice rather than finding passive comfort in imagining myself ‘one of the good guys.’ And given that open hostility against the LGBTQ+ community is still not uncommon, I understand why my statement led many to assume the worst. To be as clear as I can be, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”
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