How Matt Damon Showed Up to the 2024 Met Gala Just Hours Early

Matt Damon detailed his hilarious Met Gala incident in his Tonight’s show appearance this week.

He explained that this year he decided to attend the star-studded party because Chris Hemsworth, his friend, and Jennifer Lopez, who is married to his best friend Ben Affleck, were hosting. For the event, he and his wife, Luciana, decided to take a “vacation” and book a hotel near the museum.

“We got ready and we were a block away, so we were like, ‘Okay, we’re going to walk,’” he recalled. “And they were like, ‘No, you can’t walk. You have to drive.’”

He pointed out that the Met Gala arrival process is structured “like military precision, you’re given a time slot and you have to show up at that time slot.” Damon was given a very early start, between 6:23 and 6:30 p.m. He was told that in order to leave his hotel, “the car actually has to go all the way around the park, through it and back out the other side.”

Damon, wanting to be on time and have his Met Gala debut go smoothly, decided to leave the hotel at 5 p.m., thinking they would arrive promptly at 6:20 p.m.

“So we leave the hotel at 5 p.m. A police officer sees us getting in the car and signals for us to follow. He turns on his lights and gives us a police escort,” the actor explains. “I’m like, ‘This is unbelievable. We’re going to have a police escort.’”

Thanks to the police escort and the early departure time, the Damons arrived at 5:03 p.m.

“It doesn’t start until 8 p.m.!” host Jimmy Fallon remarked, laughing at his friend’s predicament.

“So we got out of the car and we were just baffled,” Damon recalls. “And I was like, ‘This is not normal.’ It’s a tent at the entrance, so there’s all these people with clipboards going, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing here?’ I was like, ‘We have an escort, this wasn’t planned. We’re just going to be here for an hour and 20 minutes.’ They were like, ‘No, no, it’s okay. It’s okay. Go ahead.’”

The Damons were there so early that the red carpet photographers weren’t even ready. “These guys are eating and they’re like, ‘Oh no,’ they’re grabbing their cameras,” he said.

He then explained that usually guests are greeted by the hosts, but “Chris and Jen are still getting ready.” But Anna Wintour was at the top of the stairs. “We went up this huge staircase and there she was,” Damon said. “She welcomed us and made a kind of joke because we were so early. And then she said, ‘Come on in the exhibit.'”

After walking through the exhibit, the couple headed to the main event hall, where they found “100 bartenders and servers.”

“We were in fashion very early,” Damon joked.