Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images, Everett Collection, Netflix, Amazon
If Matty Matheson were a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, he’d be Michelangelo.
At least, that’s what the chef, actor, and restaurateur wanted to be as a kid. “I think my personality definitely leaned Michelangelo,” Matheson says. “I still think TMNT is one of the greatest movies ever, too. I have two brothers and a sister, and the deal was that we had to be good in church for like a month to be able to go to the theater to see that movie. The last weekend, when we were supposed to go to the movies right after church, one of us got in trouble and we all just started crying because we were so upset. Luckily, my parents still took us.”
Now a father of three, Matheson leans into the joy (and pain) of parenting, encouraging his kids to embrace what it means to be truly bored. It’s something he’s keenly aware of himself, raw-dogging flights with no entertainment when he travels to work on shows like The Bear and his kooky cooking program, Just a Dash, now streaming on Netflix.
“This is no diss against whatever anyone else is doing, but my kids aren’t allowed to bring iPads in the car and they’re not allowed to bring anything into restaurants,” he says. “They can act like children and they can deal with boredom. That’s life. They can drop their fork as many times as they want and act like they need to use the washroom every five minutes, but you have to allow them to be bored. They have to have that time to use their imaginations, to sit there and wonder.”
Here’s what Matheson and his kids watch, listen to, and play, both on screens and off.
Photo: Disney+
For a while, I tried to get my kids into things I liked and then really quickly realized that they weren’t into a lot of it.
My youngest daughter is 5 and kind of a monster. She’s into Bluey. I don’t have a favorite episode, though. Gun to my head right now, I could not pick one.
My middle daughter, Rizzo, is 7, so she’s starting to watch — I don’t even know what the hell it is, but it’s like teenage sitcom stuff, like Hannah Montana but not. She’s a girlie-girl. She likes her purse and Taylor Swift. All of that.
Photo: Everett Collection
My son, Mac, loves Michael Myers. We lasted a long time not showing him some horror movies, but he is so dedicated to the craft of them that we gave in.
I grew up in a house where I didn’t see an R-rated movie until I was 15. But now, as long as there’s no S-E-X stuff, we’ll let him watch it. Like, he doesn’t watch Nightmare on Elm Street, but we let him watch Halloween.
He really just loves horror movies. He writes horror screenplays, too, which is so cute.
Photo: Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection
My son also likes Stranger Things.
I don’t remember if it was that show, but he was watching something and they wrote “slut” on someone’s locker, and all my kids then wanted to know what that meant. My wife and I were like, “It’s not even a bad thing. It’s just someone who loves kissing people and having fun. We don’t think it’s a problem.”
A lot of language in ’80s movies hasn’t aged well, either. We were watching The Monster Squad and they said the F-slur a couple of times, and it was just like, “Dude, we can’t watch this.”
Photo: Laurance Ratner/WireImage
On Sundays, we usually go to this diner called the Breakfast Beacon. We’ll pile into my old ’70s GMC truck and we just have a crappy little Bluetooth speaker in there. I’ll always play soul music or some good country music. They love Led Zeppelin the most. They also love Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”
Growing up, my dad was into the blues, but he was also more into AC/DC, Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath way more than he was into, say, the Beatles. He was a ’70s muscle-car guy who just wanted to listen to Foghat and, like, what was essentially the Dazed and Confused soundtrack. We always had a clapped-out Camaro or something like that as our family car, and that’s what we’d listen to when we’d drive from Fort Erie — which is in Ontario — to the Maritimes, which is like a 14-hour drive. We’d put a pillow in the middle of the back because there weren’t even three seats and us three boys would have to sit in the back, switching who sat on the pillow every 100 miles or so.
Man, a lot has changed since then. At the very least, I don’t think most parents are driving cross-country without seatbelts on their kids anymore.
Photo: DreamWorks
Maybe one of my proudest moments as a father so far was when my kids got to come to the Gabby’s Dollhouse movie premiere with me. We all got to go to L.A. and it was their first time in California, and they got to meet Gabby.
It was really cool to be a part of that and to be Cookie Bobby. They make this giant stuffed Cookie Bobby and they sent us some, and both my daughters sleep with it every night. It’s so cute. I’m truly proud to be a part of that project.
Photo: Norman Posselt/Getty Images
I taught my kids a dice game called Threes, which they love. It’s fun because you get to roll a fair amount and it’s a math game, sort of. We don’t gamble on it as a family, but me and Mac have played a couple of games for a few bucks, which was fun.
Photo: Capcom
I got my kids Nintendo Switches because I thought they’d like them, but my daughters aren’t really old enough to comprehend it yet, I don’t think. They haven’t gravitated toward the Switch.
My son plays Minecraft and Roblox, but we don’t let him play online. My middle daughter would rather play stupid, nothing games on the iPad. There’s one where you have to make eggs? It’s not even a game. It’s literally nothingness.
I did get them one of these mini Street Fighter arcade games, though, and they really like that. That made me really stoked, because they’re just using this tiny arcade machine and they’re playing against each other. It’s fun.
Photo: Amazon
My kids unfortunately don’t really care about the long legacy of excellent Canadian kids’ TV.
I always loved Mr. Dressup, which was like our version of Mister Rogers but definitely more Canadian.
I think it’s amazing that in Canada, there’s money put aside to let people build and dream and make things like that show. The show I’m working on now, Just a Dash [streaming now on Netflix], has been lucky enough to get grants from Canadian government arts programs, which feels great. I feel like a lot of major networks wouldn’t make the kind of stuff that grants help make, but some of those programs end up becoming the most beloved, earnest, good shows.