Matt Damon Says 'There's No Reason' To Not Support Inclusion Riders in Future Deals

Matt Damon is opening up about the “tool” he hopes will “combat implicit bias” in Hollywood!

The 47-year-old actor and his business partner Ben Affleck recently announced that their production company Pearl Street will be adopting an inclusion rider agreement in all their future deals.

“There have been a lot of back channel conversations that have been going on. I would say most of the people I know are activated around this and talking about this. There’s no reason our industry shouldn’t look like our country demographically,” Matt expressed while joining Stella Artois at their brands partnership launch with Water.org to help end the global water crisis held at Grand Central Terminal on Thursday (March 22) in New York City.

“We hired Fanshen [Head of Strategic Outreach] a few years ago with issues of inclusion because we needed to do better,” Matt continued (via THR). “And she brought us the Annenberg study that was done out of USC, which was just the data collection on the real numbers industry-wide. And they were horrible. It was alarming and embarrassing. So she kind of challenged us with that.”

“Hopefully, if you can use it as a tool to combat implicit bias, when Dr. Smith does her study again, we’ll see better inclusion in Hollywood. That’s the hope,” Matt added. “The rider itself is not the point. That’s the means to the end. The point is inclusion and hopefully this is the tool that can get us there.”