Celebrity Mound

As the father of four daughters ranging in age from 13 months to 13 years, Damon tells PARADE: “The only way I can describe it – it sounds stupid, but – at the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, you know how his heart grows, like, five times its size? Everything is full; it’s just full all the time.”

Here are some more highlights from the PARADE interview, out December 11:

Despite his movie star status, Damon keeps his life private, especially compared to some of his famous friends.
“Brad and Angie, there’s much more pressure on them than there is on me. He [Pitt] asked me what my everyday is like. I said, ‘Well, I grab the kids from school, and then we go over to the park.’ And he was just looking at me, like, ‘How can you do that?’ Because he can’t.”

Damon’s theory on why he can keep a low profile:
“I’ve been left alone, even by the paparazzi, because what sells is sex and scandal. Absent that, they really don’t have much interest in you. I’m still married, still working, still happy.”

On staying away from shirtless scenes:
“On the first Bourne movie, I was in the best shape of my life, and we purposely never did a shot of me with my shirt off. There’s one scene where [Bourne’s lover] is pulling the shirt over my head, but what the camera sees are the two bullet holes in my back. It’s not gratuitous; there’s a point to it. I try to stay away from the beefcake shots.”

For more on Matt Damon, including a terrific story he recounts about buddy Ben Affleck during the days he romanced Jennifer Lopez, check out these interview outtakes on Parade.com:
http://www.parade.com/celebrity/2011/12/matt-damon-outtakes.html

Matt Damon campaigned aggressively for Barack Obama last year. So why wasn’t he in Washington D.C. last week for the historic inauguration?

“[My wife] Luciana and I decided we wanted to go,” he tells the Miami Herald. “But when I called my contacts from the campaign, they just started laughing: ‘We worked on the campaign for 2 1/2 years, and we’re not going. Forget it.’

“But then they called me back the next day and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got two tickets for you, in the bleachers, and you’ll actually be able to see Obama take the oath. Just $25,000 apiece.’”

It was then that Damon (who lives with his wife and three daughters in Miami Beach) knew, “I’m going to watch. From my couch.”

Damon — whose latest Untitled Jason Bourne Project is now in production for a 2010 release — also spoke out about how his famous assassin character is nothing like James Bond.

“They could never make a James Bond movie like any of the Bourne films,” Damon said. “Because Bond is an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people. He’s repulsive.

“Steve [Soderbergh, who produced Damon's 2005 spy movie, Syriana] told me that years ago he was offered a Bond movie,” the actor went on. “He told them he’d do it if they gave him creative control.

“‘Absolutely not,’ they said. They have a formula, they stick to it, and it makes them a lot of money. They know what they’re doing, and they’re going to keep doing it.”

When he does a Bourne film, Damon later added, he never feels like he’s “slumming.”

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There were cries of adulation – and also of hunger – as Matt Damon and Haitian-born singer Wyclef Jean toured the flood-ravaged city of Gonaives on Sunday to call attention to a humanitarian crisis.

Successive hits from one tropical storm and three hurricanes submerged the city and cut off roadways in and out. Where waters have receded, streets remained a stinking mud bath and homes were left with a carpet of muck and encrusted pots, pans and laundry.

As Damon and Jean surveyed the destruction from the back of a pickup truck in a U.N. convoy, a man on a bicycle followed as far as he could, shouting out, “Wyclef, I love you, Wyclef.” Jean raised his hand, but couldn’t bring himself to smile back.

“It’s inhumane. I wish there was a word in the dictionary. No human should be living like this.”

Catching first sight of flooded homes and people living on roofs with all their belongings, Damon also was at a loss.

“I’m speechless, I can’t believe it,” he said.

Damon and Jean are encouraging more people to help the United Nations raise more than US$100 million for an estimated 800,000 Haitians in need of aid after four devastating tropical storms and hurricanes since mid-August. He went to school shelter to dropped off cooking oil from USAID and bags of beans from the World Food Program.

A proud and restive city, Gonaives is where Haiti signed its declaration of independence from France in 1804 as the world’s first black republic. Bloody protests here in 1985 led to the downfall of the father-son Duvalier dictatorship, and in 2004 a deadly march led to the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

But Hurricane Ike provoked an exodus and flooded nearly every structure.

The Gonaives police buried dozens of unidentified corpses before they stopped counting the dead. Aid agencies are concerned about medical supplies at mobile clinics treating stomach ailments, respiratory problems and cuts and infections from people walking in flooded streets.

Damon and Jean later waded through knee-deep floodwaters and climbed a stage outside the Gonaives cathedral, where about 50 people have taken refuge in the choir balcony.

Jean, who lives in New York but remains a folk hero in Haiti, sang briefly and urged crowd to stay calm and organized.

“If you love Wyclef, yell ‘help,’” said the singer and founder of the Yele Haiti philanthropic foundation.

The crowd surged the stage, and when Jean later tried to leave, people instead swept him out into the streets. Admirers clung to U.N. trucks as they drove away, some asking for money.

It’s another girl for Matt Damon and his wife, Luciana, his rep tells PEOPLE.

“Matt and Lucy Damon had a baby girl named Gia Zavala on Wednesday, Aug. 20th. Everyone’s doing great,” Damon’s rep, Jennifer Allen, tells PEOPLE. “She is a healthy baby girl.”

The newest addition is the third little girl in the Damon household, joining big sisters Isabella, 2, and Alexia, 10.

Damon recently joked about living with so many females, telling USA Today from his home in Miami, “I’m so outnumbered down here, it’s crazy.”

Damon, 37, and Luciana, 32, met in Miami Beach in 2003 while he was filming the comedy Stuck on You. They married in December 2005 at City Hall in Manhattan.

Damon is a “phenomenal” father, his close pal George Clooney told PEOPLE in 2007. “He absolutely adores those kids. He’s doing it really well.”

Damon, PEOPLE’s reigning Sexiest Man Alive, is currently preparing for re-shoots on his thriller Green Zone. But after that, the actor will enjoy some down time with his growing brood.

“[I'm] taking the rest of the year off,” he told USA Today. “I’m just hanging out with my family.”

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