Matt Damon shares that ones of his tattoos was inspired by Heath Ledger
The coverage of Matt Damon has been exhaustive this summer — well, over the last 25 years, really, but especially this summer with his strange LGBTQ+ slur controversy and the starkly contrasting five-minute standing ovation for Stillwater at Cannes.
And yet, as the October cover star for GQ, Damon still found something new to unveil about himself.
The cover story, written by Chris Heath, investigated a seemingly errant squiggly line tattooed on Damon's upper arm. It led back to the late Heath Ledger.
"That's something that Heath had on his arm," Damon, 50, said. "Heath was an incredibly restless, creative person. Like, I talked to the person who did his hair on The Patriot and she said he hated sitting still so much ‘that by the time I got the wig on and I set it and everything, and I’d finished, he’d get up and there would be a sculpture of bobby pins that he’d done.’ He was really sensitive. This stuff just flowed out of him. He was really special. I just wanted to get something that Heath had. Scott [Campbell] showed me his laptop and I said, ‘Scott, what’s that one?’ And he goes ‘I have no idea — I think that’s just some sh-t that Heath squiggled.’ And I went, 'That’s the one I want.'"
Campbell, Damon noted, "did all of Heath Ledger's tattoos," and so when his wife, Luciana "Lucy" Barroso, wanted to get inked together in 2013, Damon called Campbell. The same day, Damon got "Lucy" tattooed on the same arm in Campbell's freehand. Lucy got Ledger's squiggly line on her foot.
"It's like a little creative little blessing," Damon explained. "It's like an angel that looks over all these names that are on the arm."
Those names are Damon's daughters: Alexia, 22, Isabella, 15, Gia, 12, and Stella, 10. (Damon biologically shares Isabella, Gia and Stella with Barroso and is stepfather to Alexia.)
Damon and Ledger co-starred in 2005's The Brothers Grimm, roughly three years before Ledger died of an accidental overdose in January 2008 and posthumously earned an Oscar for his iconic portrayal of The Joker in The Dark Knight. He was just 28 years old.
Elsewhere in the profile, Damon additionally touched on how Steven Soderbergh's 2011 thriller Contagion (which Damon starred in) informed his reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, why he and Ben Affleck cried the first day of shooting Good Will Hunting, and the filming process of The Last Duel — his first time writing with Affleck since Good Will Hunting — right before the pandemic broke loose.
The Oscar winner "has nothing planned beyond The Last Duel's release" in mid-October, Heath relayed, other than "bedding down in New York" after his family's recent relocation back to the East Coast.
Watch the accompanying career retrospective video below.
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