Minnie Driver Remembers 'Sweet' Romance With Matt Damon Even Though He Broke Up With Her on 'Oprah'

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It’s been decades since Minnie Driver dated Matt Damon, but the 52-year-old actress still looks back on that time with fond memories. Even though he broke up with her on national TV (more on that in a moment), she’s a bit nostalgic about her life and the movie that changed her entire life in a new book of personal essays, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays.

In 1997, Driver, Damon and Ben Affleck had the time of their young lives filming Good Will Hunting in Boston. Driver and Damon engaged in an on-set romance that carried over after filming wrapped, but then, the movie became an instant sensation. Driver’s parents warned her that things were going to change quickly, not only for her, but for her blossoming romance with Damon, who co-write the screenplay with Affleck. “My family loved Matt — it wasn’t that,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “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.”

Despite the ominous message from her parents (of course, they were right), Damon and Affleck became toasts of the town and Driver struggled to keep their romance alive. When the Boston BFFs appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to campaign for the Oscars, Damon announced something surprising: he was single. That was certainly news to the actress at the time since he never bothered telling her in person. “It’s unfortunate that Matt went on Oprah,” she told the Los Angeles Times, via Yahoo Entertainment. “It seemed like a good forum for him to announce to the world that we were no longer together, which I found fantastically inappropriate. Of course, he was busy declaring his love for me on David Letterman a month previously.”

Buy: 'Managing Expectations' $19.59

The passage of time has softened the blow as they both went their separate ways and started their own families. It was an unprecedented moment in time in their young lives and she now likens the romance to “a sweet love affair” with “a combustible ending.”

Before you go, click here to see all the celebrity couples who met on set.