Minnie Driver knows how she looked when cameras focused on her during Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Oscars acceptance speech in 1998. And, yes, she was upset.
The moment was revisited when an Instagram video gained popularity in recent weeks — a clip that showed her ex-partner and Affleck’s excited ramblings when they won the original screenplay Academy Award for “Good Will Hunting.”
In the clip, cameras shift from the loquacious boys to Driver, who appears to give a steely look when she was shouted out in the speech. Many Instagram users noted that Driver looked sad or dejected.
Luckily, the Oscar nominee directly addressed the chatter in the post’s comment section.
“My face,” she wrote alongside several laughing face emojis and a heart emoji.
“Matt had ended our relationship a few weeks before this, and was at the Oscars with his new [girlfriend] … I was devastated,” she wrote before expressing regret about her facial expression.
“Wish I could have celebrated more as it was an amazing moment for all of us, and for this wonderful film!” she added.
Driver and “The Talented Mr. Ripley” star began dating after meeting on the set of “Good Will Hunting” in 1997. They split up right before the onset of the awards season in 1998.
The break-up was made all the more dramatic when Damon announced that they had called called it quits during an interview with Oprah Winfrey. The news came as a surprise to many, including Driver, who had not been informed of their new relationship status before Damon made it public.
“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!” she told The Times in 1998. “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.”
The “Ella Enchanted” actor spoke about her relationship with Damon last year and expressed similar feelings of hurt, but inserted a certain level of understanding into her assessment.
“I don’t care who you are, that is agony and it’s like a strange, surreal dream,” she told ET of the tabloid drama that ensued after the couple’s split. “But I know he didn’t put that picture there. It’s so tricky, because it’s not deliberate, he couldn’t have helped how famous he became and how his life was being picked over, in the same way that mine was.”
Representatives for Damon did not immediately respond Wednesday to The Times’ request for comment.
