Not being a massive Matt Damon fan in the first place—not that I have anything against the man either—I always assumed that the American actor didn’t have an Instagram account, like many others of his generation. I could live just fine with it, but apparently, his fans simply couldn’t.
In a lengthy interview with GQ magazine published on Wednesday 8 September, the Good Will Hunting actor revealed that he operates a secret, private profile on the social media platform. “I have 76 followers and I’ve done 40 posts since 2013,” Damon told GQ correspondent Chris Heath, explaining that he mainly uses the account to keep up to date with friends elsewhere in the world.
Those vague clues were enough to send his fans into a finsta frenzy. Online sleuths theorised that Damon’s Instagram profile is @odamnmatt—an anagram of Damon’s full name with the right number of followers and posts. It’s also followed by a number of verified celebrities including the actors Chris Hemsworth and Pedro Pascal, which would be unusual for a random profile.
In his interview with GQ, Damon said he’d never seen the point in social media―hence his low-key profile on the platform. “And I feel better and better about that decision as time goes on. I understand wanting to be connected to everybody on Facebook, but my life is so full and I’m connected, really, to everybody I need to be connected to,” he said, adding, “And then Twitter, I just reflexively didn’t believe that my first knee-jerk response to something was necessarily something that should go all over the world.”
Never underestimate the power of web detectives, Matt…