Matt Damon claims some actors would “prefer to go to jail” than be cancelled
Matt Damon has claimed that some actors would “prefer to go to jail” than become the victims of cancel culture within the industry.
The actor was speaking on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, alongside Ben Affleck, who stars opposite him in the new Netflix film The Rip.
As part of this, the pair discussed many facets of the modern industry, with Damon turning his attention to cancel culture and his hatred of the scrutiny that follows actors around for the course of their entire careers.
Agreeing with Rogan’s point that actors who are cancelled are often “cast out of civilisation”, Damon replied: “I bet some of those people would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months or whatever, and then come out and say, ‘I paid my debt. Like, we’re done. Like, can we be done?’”
He added: “The thing about that getting kind of excoriated, publicly like that, it just never ends. And it will just follow you to the grave.”
Affleck then chimed in on the conversation by likening cancel culture to the “‘sixth-grade instinct’ to point fingers and be like, ‘Oh, he’s in trouble.’”
The actor clarified this by adding: “Humans have dark, fucked up instincts too sometimes to isolate people or get joy out of someone else’s… they’re in trouble, because maybe because part of it is saying, ‘Hey, it’s not me.’ So if you can point the finger, everyone’s looking over there, we feel safer, you know?”
Elsewhere during the episode, Affleck voiced his personal opinion on the use of AI throughout Hollywood, playing down its long-term damaging effects as he believes the capabilities of the technology are “levelling off”.
In terms of the threat presented by AI’s ability to write scripts and potentially take jobs away from actors, he said: “I actually don’t think it’s going to be able to write anything meaningful, and in particular, that it’s going to be making movies from whole cloth, like Tilly Norwood – that’s bullshit.”
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