Minnie Driver Was ‘Devastated’ by Her Breakup From Matt Damon Ahead of the 1998 Oscars

Minnie Driver candidly opened up about the abrupt end of her relationship with Matt Damon and her unforgettable reaction to his 1998 Oscars acceptance speech.

On October 12, the Instagram account Mood Shmood posted a clip of Matt, 53, and Ben Affleck accepting the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for 1997’s Good Will Hunting. During the speech, the pair gave shout-outs to their costars, including Minnie, 53, who looked solemn in the audience.

“Minnie looks so sad,” one person commented underneath the post, which prompted a response from the Emmy nominee herself.

“Matt had ended our relationship a few weeks before this, and was at the Oscars with his new gf … I was devastated,” she wrote in her comment under the video. “Wish I could have celebrated more, as it was an amazing moment for all of us, and for this wonderful film!”

Minnie and Matt met on the set of the drama film and began dating soon after. But their romance didn’t last, and he started dating Winona Ryder in the months following their 1998 split. The Saving Private Ryan actor and Winona, 52, dated for two years before breaking up in 2000.

Matt has been happily married to his wife, Luciana Barroso, since 2005. Minnie is currently in a relationship with Addison O’Dea. She previously opened up about her relationship with Matt and their very public breakup.

“My family loved Matt — it wasn’t that. It was that they could see that this young man was rocketing really fast and so was I, and when you’re young, it’s pretty hard to keep your head on straight and to maintain a grounded sense of deportment,” she told Entertainment Tonight in May 2022. “They were like, ‘This may well end badly for reasons that are to do with all these things coming together in a perfect storm.'”

She also explained what was going through her mind during Matt’s Oscars acceptance speech in 1998.

“There’s a guy who’d been sent, the cameraman at the Academy Awards — he’d literally been told to, like, stay on me and, like, he was so in my grill, he was like a wildlife photographer waiting for the kill,” Minnie recalled. “He was just waiting for the moment that I was going to break, or something was going to happen, or I was going to get up and scream. He’d been told, ‘Stay on her, bud. Something’s going to happen.’”