Matt Damon’s politics owe a great deal to his mother. The first time Nancy Carlsson-Paige saw her son featured in a glossy magazine, she was appalled. “My beautiful boy is being used to sell products,” she told a newspaper. “He is just a cog in the capitalist system.” She’d never even read a magazine like Vanity Fair before, her son explains. “She’s a professor. If it’s not the Nation, she doesn’t read it. And she said, ‘This thing is nothing but page after page of adverts for products that nobody needs!’” He chuckles. I’d love to know what his mother makes of his latest film, Elysium, a big-budget sci-fi action thriller packed with set-piece fights and expensive pyrotechnic violence. “Hmm, well, my mom’s big on non-violent conflict resolution,” he grins.
Damon has travelled a long way from the Boston commune where he grew up in the 70s and 80s among five other families who were, if not quite hippies, then firmly on the countercultural left. Today he is one of cinema’s all-time highest-grossing leading men, voted World’s Sexiest Man by People magazine, with his own star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. A father of four (three daughters, aged seven, five and three, and a stepdaughter, 15), this summer he is moving his family from New York to Los Angeles, and the challenge of giving them a childhood that remotely resembles the one he enjoyed is about to get even harder.
Choosing a school has already presented a major moral dilemma. “Sending our kids in my family to private school was a big, big, big deal. And it was a giant family discussion. But it was a circular conversation, really, because ultimately we don’t have a choice. I mean, I pay for a private education and I’m trying to get the one that most matches the public education that I had, but that kind of progressive education no longer exists in the public system. It’s unfair.” Damon has campaigned against teachers’ pay being pegged to children’s test results: “So we agitate about those things, and try to change them, and try to change the policy, but you know, it’s a tough one.”
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/02/matt-damon-activist-star-elysium
“but that kind of progressive education no longer exists in the public system. It’s unfair.”
What drugs is he on?
In public schools he can have his daughter finding boys in her shower and his elementary school-age kids will come home to practice with their condoms
“Damon has travelled a long way from the Boston commune where he grew up in the 70s and 80s among five other families who were, if not quite hippies, then firml
“Damon has travelled a long way from the Boston commune where he grew up in the 70s and 80s ———”
Damon never lived in Boston.
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