Matt Damon has spoken out after he put his foot in it in a recent interview where he declared he will now be “retiring” the “F-slur” from his lexicon.

In case you missed it, in a recent interview with The Sunday Times while promoting his new film Stillwater, Matt Damon admitted he stopped using the outdated slur after one of his four daughters called him out over it during dinner.

“The word that my daughter calls the ‘f-slur for a homosexual’ was commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application,” Damon said.

“I made a joke, months ago, and got a treatise from my daughter. She left the table. I said, ‘Come on, that’s a joke! I say it in the movie Stuck on You!’ She went to her room and wrote a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous. I said, ‘I retire the f-slur!’ I understood.”

Understandably, the Twittersphere went into meltdown over the admission, with many pointing out that Damon shouldn’t need his daughter to tell him that the slur was horribly offensive.

Now, Damon has spoken out amid the major backlash in order to attempt to clarify his comments.

“During a recent interview, I recalled a discussion I had with my daughter where I attempted to contextualise for her the progress that has been made — though by no means completed — since I was growing up in Boston and, as a child, heard the word ‘f-g’ used on the street before I knew what it even referred to,” Damon wrote in a statement via the Hollywood Reporter.

“I explained that that word was used constantly and casually and was even a line of dialogue in a movie of mine as recently as 2003; she in turn expressed incredulity that there could ever have been a time where that word was used unthinkingly,” he continued.

“To my admiration and pride, she was extremely articulate about the extent to which that word would have been painful to someone in the LGBTQ+ community regardless of how culturally normalised it was.

“I not only agreed with her but thrilled at her passion, values and desire for social justice.”

Damon continued: “I have never called anyone ‘f—-t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening. I do not use slurs of any kind.

“I have learned that eradicating prejudice requires active movement toward justice rather than finding passive comfort in imagining myself ‘one of the good guys.’ And given that open hostility against the LGBTQ+ community is still not uncommon, I understand why my statement led many to assume the worst.

“To be as clear as I can be, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”

But will the actor’s clarification be enough to quell the anger of angry social media users? Only time will tell.

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