Matt Damon's Kids: Everything He's Said About Parenting 4 Daughters (original) (raw)

Matt Damon and his wife, Luciana Damon, are parents to four daughters: Alexia, Isabella, Gia and Stella.

The Air actor and Luciana first crossed paths while she was bartending in Miami Beach and he was in town filming Stuck on You. When they met, Luciana had one daughter, Alexia, who was four at the time.

"I jumped into the deep end with Lucy. I mean, Alexia was already 4. I was an extra dad," he told Parade of becoming a stepfather to Alexia, now 25, after he and Luciana wed in 2005.

After marrying, Matt and Luciana welcomed three more daughters: Isabella, 18, Gia, 16, and Stella, 14.

"It was very different, it's true," the actor said of his path to fatherhood, "but I can't imagine my life having not gone down that road. I can't imagine what my life would be now. I don't want to imagine it."

In 2019, Matt made his love for his girls permanent by getting all four of their names tattooed on his right upper arm. The sweet inscriptions appear next to his preexisting "Lucy" tattoo, which he previously got inked in honor of Luciana.

"On a whim, my wife said, 'We're going to get tattoos today,' so I got a tattoo of her name," Matt told Access Hollywood of his new body art. "And it always felt alone on my arm, and I've always wanted to put the kids on there."

Matt and Luciana are working hard to raise conscientious daughters who care about the world the same way their parents do.

"The way you have to parent them is to show them the world. Explaining the world can only go so far," the actor said in 2008 of involving his daughters in his charity work. "You can read about devastation every morning — it's on the front page of the newspaper — but when you actually go there and see it, you realize this isn't something you can turn the page on."

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Despite having one of the world's most famous leading men for a dad, Matt's four daughters tend to stay out of the spotlight. However, in July 2024, Alexia, Isabella, Gia and Stella all joined Matt at the premiere of his latest film, The Instigators.

Keep reading for everything to know about Matt Damon and Luciana Damon's four daughters, including his best quotes about fatherhood over the years.

Alexia Barroso, 25

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Luciana welcomed her first daughter, Alexia, with her then-husband Arbello Barroso in Argentina in 1999. After the couple divorced, Luciana met Matt in 2003.

Luciana later explained to Vogue Australia that she initially refused Matt's offer to go out with his friends after their first encounter because she had to get home to Alexia.

"But I was like, 'I can't, I have a four-year-old daughter, I'm not going anywhere' … and that was one of the things he loved, that I had a daughter," she recalled. "He said, 'I love that you're a mum and that's your priority.' Some guys might have been different, they might think it's complicated, but for him it wasn't."

As Matt described it, life changed very suddenly when he met Luciana and her daughter. "Suddenly, it wasn't just my wife. It was her 4-year-old little girl," he told Hello! Canada in 2010. "There was never a choice. It was just the way it was, and I was happy for that."

Matt became Alexia's stepfather after he and Luciana got married, and the father-daughter duo have a close relationship. In 2015, The Martian star talked to USA Today about taking time out of his busy filming schedule to teach Alexia to drive.

"My oldest daughter just got her license yesterday," he said. "She would drive last year just to school every morning. We'd get in the car and drive."

Alexia has even appeared in a movie with Matt, making a cameo in 2009's We Bought a Zoo as a member of the zoo staff. As she's grown up, she's seemingly continued to develop an interest in film and TV. In 2017, Matt's The Great Wall costar Pedro Pascal recalled how Alexia binge-watched Game of Thrones while they were filming on location in China.

"[Matt's] oldest daughter Alexia watched Game of Thrones when we were in China," Pascal, who played Oberyn Martell in the series, told PEOPLE Now. "It was really cool to see her watch it."

"She's a hard critic, though," he continued. "She's very, very sharp, like her mom and dad."

However, like most viewers of the critically acclaimed show, Alexia was an immediate fan. Pascal added, "And that she approved was the biggest stamp of approval I could've ever gotten."

Isabella Damon, 18

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Matt and Luciana welcomed their first child together, Isabella, on June 11, 2006, in Miami, Florida.

Becoming a father changed everything for Matt. "I really used to have no life outside movies. I'd work all day, go to the gym and go to sleep," he told UK's Sunday Express when Isabella was 1. "Now I have a place to be so I come home after work."

Parenting a newborn apparently had some perks when it came to Matt's career. The actor, who was filming The Bourne Ultimatum at the time, recalled to the outlet how the film's director told him he looked "terrible" halfway through filming.

"I told him, 'I'm sorry. I'm awake all night with the baby,' to which he said, 'No, it's really good. She came along just at the right time — she's really helping your performance,' " he recalled.

Now, Isabella is a typical teenager — meaning she loves to give her famous dad grief, especially about his less successful movies. "If the reviews come out and they're terrible, then she'll watch it," Matt told E! News in 2021. "If they come out and they're good, she's going to pass ... She's looking for ammunition all the time."

"She's like one of the funniest people I've ever met," he added. "She's really cool."

While she might not be fazed by her dad's celebrity status, Isabella isn't immune to the charms of Harry Styles. Matt recalled during a 2021 interview with Tara Hitchcock how he once surprised his daughter with the ultimate Christmas gift: a personal video from Styles himself.

"Last Christmas, my wife, it was a one-two punch," he said. "We gave my 15-year-old a life-size cardboard cutout of Harry Styles. Harry Styles did a little video and said 'Hello' to her, and she lost her mind. I think that was the best we've done so far. I don't know how we'll top it."

A few months later, Matt officially became "father of the year" when he took Isabella and her two younger sisters to a Styles concert in October 2021. The actor recalled the outing to PEOPLE, explaining that he "knew every word to every song" despite being "too old" for the singer's typical demographic.

"It was great. Yeah, yeah it was great," he said. "They love him. And that album dropped, or at least I became aware of it, in that first lockdown. So we had that on repeat."

Gia Damon, 16

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Matt and Luciana's second child together, Gia, was born on August 20, 2008, in Miami.

"It's great," Matt said about being outnumbered by girls at home shortly after Gia's arrival. "It is really great."

From a young age, Gia and her sisters started joining Matt on the road as he traveled for various projects. When she was just a toddler, she visited her father on the New Mexico set of True Grit in 2010. "They were interested in seeing the horses," he said of his daughters' trip to set. "So, we got some pictures of them with the horses."

The family also traveled to Africa while Matt was filming Invictus, where they got the opportunity to meet with Nelson Mandela. "Lucy and I didn't even talk to him, we just let him hang out with the kids. He bounced them on his knee," Matt recalled of the once-in-a-lifetime meeting.

"Isabella and Gia couldn't take their eyes off him," he continued. "They just were looking at each other, completely locked on each other the entire time."

Stella Damon, 14

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Matt and Luciana's youngest daughter, Stella, was born on Oct. 20, 2010, in New York City. "It's been pretty crazy," Matt said of the time just after Stella's birth. "The baby came a couple of weeks early. It's our fourth, so we've done it before — but it's a whole new dynamic."

The family has lived all over the world, including in Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic, where they chose to stay even as production for The Last Duel paused. "My family and I, we just took a vote and we decided to stay and it was a great decision," Matt said while appearing on the The Tonight Show with Ben Affleck in 2021. "We had a great time there and just got absorbed into this beautiful little community."

Matt and Luciana spent plenty of quality time with their daughters while in Ireland, engaging in some common at-home activities to pass the time — including DIY makeovers.

"I had let the kids dye my hair red. It was their art project basically, and it was clear that we weren't going back to work," Matt recalled to his pal Affleck. "Then they decide that I needed a mohawk, so they mohawked me."

After leaving Ireland, Matt and Luciana moved the family back to N.Y.C. "We're moving at the end of the month and school's September. We can't wait to move back here," Matt told PEOPLE of their relocation from California, where they had been living when they weren't traveling for his work.

As for the prospect of eventually living with three teenage daughters in one house, he joked, "I might have to find a rental apartment but I'm excited."