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Celebrities would rather serve a jail sentence than be cancelled, according to Matt Damon.
The Oscar-winning actor said the never-ending nature of cancellation meant some actors would rather pay a “debt” and get it over with, claiming cancel culture followed those affected to their graves.
Damon, 55, was talking about the topic on the Joe Rogan podcast alongside Ben Affleck. Saying that people could be cast out “in perpetuity” by being cancelled, he suggested some celebrities would rather spend time in prison.
“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. We’re done. Can we be done?’
“The thing about that getting kind of excoriated, publicly like that, it just never ends. It will just follow you to the grave,” he said.
Affleck, 53, agreed, saying humans had “dark instincts” in taking enjoyment out of someone else’s misfortune.
“It’s that sixth grade instinct to be like ‘oh, he’s in trouble,’” he added. “We have dark instincts to sometimes isolate people or get joy out of someone else being in trouble. Maybe because part of it is ‘hey, it’s not me’.
“If you point the finger and everyone’s looking over there, you feel safer. To take any forgiveness out of it, is a really f—ing up thing. I don’t think anybody wants to think you’re the sum total of who you are as your worst moment.”
Affleck said cancelling people made it “impossible” for them to apologise and come back from mistakes they had made because they were typically already “outcast”.
In 2021, Damon was embroiled in controversy after reports that he had only stopped using the homophobic slur “faggot” after his daughter told him to.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, he said she had written him a treatise on “how that word is dangerous” after he used it in a joke, telling the newspaper the word was “commonly used when I was a kid with a different application”.
In a later interview with Variety, he claimed to have never used the word in his personal life, nor “slurs of any kind”.
Cancelling often comes as a result of comments made online or in public by celebrities, which are deemed to have crossed a moral line. The threat of such damage to lucrative careers is so real that a company introduced insurance against it last year.
Celebrities to have faced anger as a result of their views include JK Rowling and Graham Linehan, who are both gender-critical campaigners.