Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are sharing their thoughts on cancel culture in Hollywood.
While promoting their latest movie, The Rip, the Oscar winners stopped by the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where the host brought up the “concept that one thing you said or one thing you probably did, and now we’re going to exaggerate that to the fullest extent and solid you out of civilization for all times.”
Damon, who agreed with Joe Rogan that cancel culture is a crazy concept, went on to suggest that some people within the industry would probably have preferred to go to prison fairly than face lifetime public scrutiny.
“I bet a few of those people would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months or whatever, after which come out and say, ‘I paid my debt. Like, we’re done. Like, can we be done?’ The thing about that getting form of excoriated, publicly like that, it just never ends. And it would just follow you to the grave,” the Oppenheimer actor said.
Affleck went on to match cancel culture to the “form 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 another person’s… they’re in trouble, because perhaps because a part of it’s saying, ‘Hey, it’s not me.’ So should you can point the finger, everyone’s looking over there, we feel safer, you recognize?” he continued.
“And to take any forgiveness out of it’s a very fucked up thing because then it makes it unimaginable to really go, ‘All right, yeah, I did that. That was fallacious. I get it.’ Since it doesn’t matter; when you’ve said you’ve done it, you develop into like an outcast,” Affleck added. “And I don’t think anybody desires to think the sum total of who you’re is your worst moment.”
Damon knows a bit about what it’s wish to be at the middle 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 really long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous.”
The actor later clarified in an announcement to The Hollywood Reporter that he has never used the slur personally. “I actually have never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a private awakening,” Damon wrote partly. “I don’t use slurs of any kind. I actually have learned that eradicating prejudice requires energetic movement toward justice fairly than finding passive comfort in imagining myself ‘considered one of the nice guys.’ And provided that open hostility against the LGBTQ+ community remains to be not unusual, I understand why my statement led many to assume the worst. To be as clear as I could be, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”