The Oscar winner met Luciana Barroso while he was filming the 2003 movie Stuck on You in Miami, where she was tending bar. In a twist of fate, the movie, which he was initially hesitating to sign on to, was supposed to film in Hawaii.
“I literally saw her across a crowded room, literally,” he explained on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2011. “I don’t know how else our paths would’ve crossed if that didn’t happen. If all those things didn’t happen…When you’re tired, suck it up and go to the bar and you might meet your wife.”
Two years after their fateful meeting, they tied the knot in a quiet civil ceremony and have been happily busy raising their four girls—their daughters together, Isabella, Gia and Stella, and Alexia, Barroso’s daughter from her previous marriage.
“A lot of it boils down to luck: my wife’s a civilian and that takes a lot of pressure off,” Damon told The Guardian of their low-key marriage. “It’s really sex and scandal that moves those magazines, and there’s nothing scandalous about a guy who’s married and has kids. If they come outside where I live, they are going to die of boredom—there’s just nothing really going on that would sell a magazine.”