Matt Damon and Minnie Driver at the premiere of Good Will HuntingMinnie Driver says her first Oscars experience was soured by the fact that she got dumped by Matt Damon not long before the award show.
The British actor spoke about the evening while commenting on an Instagram video of Matt and Ben Affleck accepting the Original Screenplay award for Good Will Hunting in 1998.
While the pair could barely contain their joy during their speech, Minnie looked noticeably sullen when the camera cut to her.
The Grosse Pointe Blank star looked back on things with a laugh in a response captured by the Instagram account Comments by Celebs.
“My face,” she wrote along with a series of crying emojis and a red heart.
Minnie Driver shared the backstory about her sullen look at the 1998 Oscars in an Instagram comment.Explaining why she looked “so sad” in a reply to a fan, Minnie wrote: “Matt had ended our relationship a few weeks before this, and was at the Oscars with his new [girlfriend]... I was devastated.
“Wish I could have celebrated more as it was an amazing moment for all of us, and for this wonderful film!”
The exes met on the set of Good Will Hunting in 1997 and began dating.
Minnie was reportedly surprised when Matt declared he was single during a January 1998 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Minnie Driver at the Academy Awards in March 1998.“I was with Minnie for a while, but we’re not really romantically involved anymore. We’re just really good friends,” he told Oprah, adding that the match just “wasn’t meant to be”.
Matt maintained he and Minnie had split before his announcement, but she called his reveal “fantastically inappropriate” in an interview with the Los Angeles Times several months later.
She looked back at the relationship with mixed feelings in an interview with Entertainment Tonight last year, saying: “That was just a sweet romance that was just a sweet love affair in the centre of all of that stuff, but had a combustible ending, which then became the focus.”
