Matt Damon’s quarantine life has been great, thanks for asking. For around two months now, the actor has been hunkering down in Dalkey, a verdant seaside village in Ireland that mononymous celebs like Bono and Enya have called home. Damon was there to shoot Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel—but once production was shut down, he decided to stay put along with his family and the teachers who had already been hired to give lessons to three of his children, who were planning to miss eight weeks of school because of the film’s production. (His eldest daughter, Alexia, has remained in New York, where she attends college. She contracted the virus, but “got through it fine,” Damon said.)
“It feels a little like a fairy tale here,” Damon recently told local radio station Spin 1038 of his idyllic circumstance. “When we came in they [Dalkey natives] were like, ‘Well, Bono lives over there, and Enya lives over there.’ […] It’s incredible. This is one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever been.” Damon has, of course, had a FaceTime session with Bono, a friend.
Lest you think he’s rubbing it in all our faces, Damon also took a brief moment to acknowledge the broad horror of the pandemic. “Obviously what’s going on in the world is horrible, but for my family—I’m with my whole family; I’ve got my kids, and we have teachers with us because we were planning on missing school for about eight weeks,” he said. “We’ve got what nobody else has, which is actual live human beings teaching our kids…so we feel guilty.”
Plus, Dalkey! Damon is loving Dalkey. He can’t say enough about the place. “We’ve got this kind of incredible setup in this place. It’s absolutely gorgeous…There’s trees and forests and and woods and ocean. I can’t think of any place you’d rather wanna be in a two-kilometer radius of,” he said. He also praised the country’s taoiseach (aka prime minister), Leo Varadkar, a former doctor who has jumped back into health care during the coronavirus crisis. “I mean, what a badass. It’s just on another level,” Damon said.
Damon will eventually have to return to Los Angeles, he said—but he’s “a little worried about going home,” because “we don’t have adequate testing so there’s going to be another surge, it looks like.”
Perhaps this accidental Dalkey vacation is good karma Damon earned by starring in Contagion. Or, hey—maybe it has nothing to do with karma, and everything to do with being a movie star in the right place at the right time. Dalkey has, in turn, adopted Damon as one of its own, with the star being praised for the way he has adapted to life in the town and shops at local grocery stores. Stars: They’re just like us?
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