Matt Damon on decision to adopt inclusion riders

MATT Damon (above) decided to adopt inclusion riders after realising the “alarming and embarrassing” reality of diversity in Hollywood.

The Downsizing star and his production partner, Ben Affleck, vowed to “do better” to ensure racial and gender equality on movies producer by their company Pearl Street after being shocked by the results of a survey commissioned on the subject.

Talking about the hiring of Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni as head of strategic outreach at Pearl Street, Matt told The Hollywood Reporter: “We hired Fanshen a few years ago with issues of inclusion because we needed to do better. 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.”

He and Ben asked what was “actionable” and how they could make changes, so were introduced to Stacy L. Smith, who had conducted the study and first proposed the idea of inclusion riders.

Matt, 47, recalled: “Dr. Smith started to talk to us and many, many others across the industry -- actors to directors to producers, lawyers, agents, studio heads and executives.

“Really, she was having a lot of these conversations concurrently and suggested an inclusion rider as a way to combat implicit bias. Because the implicit bias is just so strong and the numbers bore that out... “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.

“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.” — BANG

Showbiz