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Minnie Driver on running into Matt Damon last year: 'I had not had a conversation with him' since 1998 breakup

Maybe time can heal all wounds.

Minnie Driver said she ran into Matt Damon last year for the first time since their infamous split. The actress, who fell in love with Damon during 1997's Good Will Hunting, detailed the "nice" moment on Monday's Keep It! podcast.

Minnie Driver details a recent run-in with ex-boyfriend, Matt Damon. (Photo: Getty Images)
Minnie Driver details a recent run-in with ex-boyfriend, Matt Damon. (Photo: Getty Images)

"I did see Matt Damon on the beach and I had not had a conversation with him, seriously, since we made the film," the Cinderella star shared. "That was last summer and it was actually very nice to see him, and his kids, and his wife and it all felt quite middle-aged actually, which was reassuring."

Damon married wife Luciana in 2005 and they are parents to four children.

"I feel like so much of the folly of youth went on with our initial relationship, like it was amazing and tabloidy," Driver continued. "So that was nice to just have sort of a middle-aged conversation about the weather and stuff."

Driver, 51, and Damon, 50, met when she auditioned for Good Will Hunting. She later recalled to The Telegraph she was "completely in love with Matt" by the time the film went into production.

"I was blown away by his commitment to me as an actor, he was cute and intelligent and altogether a really charming package. I was young and I fell for him — it's an occupational hazard," she recalled.

Matt Damon and Minnie Driver together at the Good Will Hunting premiere in December 1997.
Matt Damon and Minnie Driver together at the Good Will Hunting premiere in December 1997. (Photo: Getty Images)

The actors made several public appearances together as a couple in 1997. Around the time the film was released in January 1998, Damon started stepping out with a different actress: Winona Ryder. He then announced he was single on The Oprah Winfrey Show, much to the surprise of Driver.

"There are these archetypes that everybody has to take apart," Driver told the Los Angeles Times in 1998. "I had to be the victim. It's horrendous breaking up with someone anyway, but to have it be so public and to be cast in a role that I would never play if they were paying me — this wronged woman! It's unfortunate that Matt went on Oprah; it seemed like a good forum for him to announce to the world that we were no longer together, which I found fantastically inappropriate. Of course, he was busy declaring his love for me on David Letterman a month previously."

After awards season ended, the two didn't cross paths again for decades. But Driver had no problem calling out her ex. In December 2017, Damon made some controversial statements at the start of the #MeToo movement, saying there's "a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation. Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn't be conflated."

Driver responded on Twitter.

"I felt I desperately needed to say something. I've realized that most men, good men, the men that I love, there is a cut-off in their ability to understand. They simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level," she explained to The Guardian. "I honestly think that until we get on the same page, you can't tell a woman about their abuse. A man cannot do that. No one can. It is so individual and so personal, it's galling when a powerful man steps up and starts dictating the terms, whether he intends it or not."

It's a good thing they kept it light on the beach.