Actor Matt Damon has revealed he only stopped using a homophobic slur months ago, after being called out by his daughter over its use.

Damon, who is currently starring in the film Stillwater, was referring to the “f-word slur for homosexual”.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, he said his daughter left the table after he used it in front of her, adding: “I said, ‘Come on, that’s a joke! I say it in the movie Stuck on You!’.

“I made a joke, months ago, and got a treatise from my daughter. 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.”

He suggested that the word “was commonly used” when he was growing up “with a different application”.

Among those criticising the 50-year-old for still using the term up until a few months ago was actor and comedian Billy Eichner, who wrote: “I want to know what word Matt Damon has replaced f***** with.”

Travon Free, another US comedian, added: “So Matt Damon just figured out ‘months ago’, by way of a “treatise” from a child, that he’s not supposed to say the word f*****. Months ago. Months ago.”

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Damon is currently promoting his film Stillwater, and he told Sky News last week that the movie helped challenge his perceptions about “roughnecks” from Oklahoma.

“I come from a very different culture within America. I’m from the North East and Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a very different place from Stillwater, Oklahoma, or some of the smaller places outside Stillwater where these guys live,” Damon explained.

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“And so I had my own ideas about what I was going to see when I went down there, and as always, as happens literally every time in a world in which we’re constantly being told by, particularly by politicians, how divided we are and who are stoking those flames in order to kind of self-promote – you get past all that and it’s what connects us that is so much greater than what divides us.”

The film has divided critics, though many have praised Damon’s performance – but the actor hopes that the movie will ultimately unite audiences.

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