The ‘Oppenheimer’ star Matt Damon revealed how the U2 singer Bono once musically criticized his son Elijah Hewson, who also fronts the band Inhaler, in a new chat with Radio X HQ.
After naming Inhaler as one of his favorite bands, the actor went on to share the conversation he had with Bono about his son’s music:
“I actually talked to Bono about it a couple of years ago, and he had me laughing. There’s a song that they wrote called ‘Ice Cream Sundae,’ and in the first line, his son writes, ‘I’m in the pursuit of happiness/I’m gonna get it, I’m gonna get it.’ And then the second verse goes, ‘I’m in the pursuit of happiness/I’m gonna get it/I’m gonna get it.'”
He continued, recalling the frontman’s response to Elijah’s lyrics:
“And Bono goes: ‘You can’t start the second verse with the same line as the same first verse,’ and his son was like, ‘Yeah okay, Dad.'”
Then, Matt compared his experience while writing ‘Good Will Hunting’ to the situation Bono and his son faced, explaining:
“When we wrote ‘Good Will Hunting,’ I remember everybody was like, ‘These scenes are too long. You can’t write scenes that are this long long,’ and we were just like, ‘Yeah, okay. Sure’. It’s that thing where the next generation comes in and goes, no, we’re doing it this way.”
It seems like Bono was also critical of his son’s pursuit of music, besides his songwriting skills. When asked if his parents were supportive of his music career in a 2020 interview with GQ, Hewson replied by saying:
“At the beginning, they weren’t really. I mean, they wanted me to go to college, you know, like all of our parents. I think they just kind of saw that I loved it and that we were good.”
You can watch the actor’s chat with Radio X HQ here.
