Matt Damon Says Getting ‘Canceled’ Will ‘Follow You to the Grave’: ‘I Bet Some of Those People Would’ve Preferred to Go to Jail for 18 Months’ Instead

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck continued their press tour for Netflix’s “The Rip” with an interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” where the eponymous podcast host and Damon reflected on cancel culture in Hollywood. The Oscar nominee said some canceled actors probably would’ve preferred to gone to jail and serve time than deal with the never-ending turmoil that comes with “cancel culture.”

Rogan described being “canceled” as “this 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” (via The Daily Beast).

“In perpetuity,” Damon replied about the forever nature of cancel culture. “Because 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’s the first thing that… you know, it just will follow you to the grave.”

Damon knows a thing or two about surviving internet outrage. He infamously combated cancel culture in 2021 when an interview he gave to the The Sunday Times earned backlash due to the actor saying he had stopped using the F-slur only “months ago” because his daughter wrote him a “treatise” on “how that word is dangerous.” Damon clarified in a statement to Variety soon after that he never used the word in his “personal life” and does not “use slurs of any kind.” He also affirmed that he understands why the interview “led many to assume the worst.”

“During a recent interview, I recalled a discussion I had with my daughter where I attempted to contextualize for her the progress that has been made – though by no means completed – since I was growing up in Boston and, as a child, heard the word ‘f*g’ used on the street before I knew what it even referred to,” Damon wrote in a statement. “I explained that that word was used constantly and casually and was even a line of dialogue in a movie of mine as recently as 2003; she in turn expressed incredulity that there could ever have been a time where that word was used unthinkingly. To my admiration and pride, she was extremely articulate about the extent to which that word would have been painful to someone in the LGBTQ+ community regardless of how culturally normalized it was. I not only agreed with her but thrilled at her passion, values and desire for social justice.”

Damon continued, “I have never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening. I do not use slurs of any kind,” Damon continued. “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.”

Despite the controversy, Damon’s career was not impacted in any major way and he went on to have starring roles in “Air,” “Oppenheimer” and more. He’ll be back on the big screen later this year in the lead role of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.”

Watch Damon and Affleck’s full interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience” in the video below.