Matt Damon talks quarantining in Ireland: ‘It’s like a fairy tale here’

Matt Damon is smitten with the seaside suburb of Dalkey, Ireland, where he, his wife, Luciana Barroso, and three youngest daughters have been in quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic.

“It feels like a fairy tale here,” the “Contagion” star told local radio station Spin 1038. “This is one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever been.”

Damon, 49, whose close friend Bono has a house in the same town, said he was advised to stay within two kilometers from his house during lockdown.

“I mean two kilometers of here there’s tress and forests and woods and oceans, I can’t think of any place else you’d rather want to be in a 2 kilometer radius of,” he said.

The movie star said Dalkey shut down within days of him and his family arriving there, so he has not been able to enjoy all that it has to offer. However, he did get to visit a bookstore and a local coffee shop, where he said he became friendly with a barista.

“She said, which I thought was really interesting because I worked at a counter, one of my first jobs, she said, ‘Normally this place is really buzzing and I’ve actually gotten to know all of my customers because each come in for three to five minutes and we chat,’” Damon shared.

The “Jason Bourne” star’s stay in Ireland will end soon, however, because they plan to reunite with his stepdaughter, Alexia, who recently contracted the coronavirus while attending college in New York.

“We’ve got the three younger ones and our oldest one, we’ll reunite with her at the end of the month … but everybody’s okay,” Damon said. “We’re going to go back to Los Angeles and [Alexia is] going to come out so we’ll all be together and figure out what the heck we’re going to do. It’s such an odd limbo that we’re all in.”

He then praised Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar — the country’s prime minister — for how he has handled the pandemic.

“You’ve got a president who just goes to the hospital and starts working,” the actor said. “I mean what a badass, it’s just on another level.”

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