Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made history in 2022 when she was sworn in as the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, several years before attaining that feat, the 53-year-old briefly rubbed shoulders with Academy Award winner Matt Damon.
In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Jackson, who is a Harvard alum, revealed that she and Damon, 53, were once scene partners in a drama class when they were students at the prestigious Ivy League university. She said the Bourne Identity actor was a year in front of her at the university.
“He’s not going to remember this, of course, but [it was] for Waiting for Godot,” Jackson said. “The reason why I remember it is because he was already kind of well-known around campus and off campus, so it was kind of exciting to be his scene partner for a particular class.”
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Jackson also recalled her professor commended her performance after the play – though that wasn’t the case for the now-famous actor. “At the end, the professor said, ‘Ketanji, you were very good. Matt, we’ll talk,’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I was better than Matt Damon in a scene.’”
Unlike Jackson, Damon dropped out of Harvard after he landed a role in the 1993 movie, Geronimo: An American Legend. And though Jackson vividly remembers being scene partners with Damon, the actor in a statement to The Associated Press in 2022 said he could not recollect taking the stage with the Supreme Court judge. He, however, said, “That’s so cool!”
Jackson was born in Washington DC and raised in Miami by parents who are both graduates of historically black colleges. Jackson has two degrees from Harvard University, which she attended as an undergraduate and as a law student, and once served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. While at Harvard, BBC reports that she led protests against a student who draped a Confederate flag from his dorm window.
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