If you're wondering whether Matthew McConaughey’s new memoir lives up to his reputation as our preeminent frat boy–hippie shaman, this passage should help assuage all doubts:
“I’ve done peyote in Real de Catorce, Mexico, in a cage with a mountain lion. I’ve had seventy-eight stitches sewn into my forehead, by a veterinarian. I’ve had four concussions from falling out of four trees, three of them on a full moon. I’ve bongoed naked until the cops arrested me.”
And that’s just on page 10. In Greenlights, the actor builds up the existing McConaughey mythos with delightfully voicey recollections of his raucous childhood and the (wet) dreams that inspired soul-searching journeys to the Amazon and Africa. He also attempts to dismantle it, emphasizing the diligent work it takes to get to that place—where he’s seen as the chillest man in the world. The work, for instance, that helped him famously pivot from the rom-com hunk you want to have a beer with to the dramatic auteur you want to have a beer with, and that snagged him an Oscar along the way. Now, a few years removed from the McConaissance, the actor says he’s less preoccupied with his on-screen career.
“This book has been my obsession for the last two years,” he tells me in his signature McConaughese drawl on a video call from his ranch in Austin, Texas. “That's where I've been. It's been my singular obsession as far as work. It's the truest permanent extension I've ever put out or created of myself.”
McConaughey has spent this unexpected year hunkering down with his wife, Camila, their three children, and his 88-year-old mother, Kat. His day-to-day is a bit more subdued than the events in Greenlights—which include an encounter in Mali where he held his own when challenged to a wrestling match by the strongest man several villages over. He’s been writing more, popping up occasionally to deliver coronavirus pep talks to our weary nation. And he’s taken up a new hobby. “I've done more puzzles than I'd done in a while with the family,” he says, laughing. “We have constant puzzles out there.”
GQ: You sourced a lot of the book from your own diaries. Was there anything you encountered that really surprised you?
Matthew McConaughey: I remembered more than I thought I forgot. I was still embarrassed with some things I thought I might be embarrassed about, but I also laughed at a lot of stuff that I thought I might be embarrassed about. I’m a more evolved man now than I was at 14 years old, when I started writing diaries, but I saw the subject matters I was interested in—I was like, "You're essentially the same person, Matthew. You're still interested in culture, how the world works. How can I be a better person? How can I be a better version of myself?"
I'm not much for looking back. I'm not a big sentimentalist. I don't really like nostalgia. It was intimidating to go look at 36 years of my diaries, and I knew it would be uncomfortable at times. I'd been putting this off for 15 years and finally got some time and the courage to go, "Let's go see what they are." And ended up having a much better time than I thought I might.
What did you think you’d be more embarrassed about?
Well, youth. You think you're gonna live forever. There were other times where I was arrogant to the extreme. The ego was on super unleaded.
You write about the period of time where you transitioned from making rom-coms to the more serious second act of your career, which has become widely known as the McConaissance. Do you think we’re still in the McConaissance?
I'd say that was that. Could there be another run and another name, something lyrical and fun and easy to say—it comes off the lips like that and has a bit of rhyme and reason to it? Maybe. Remember, I was back to back to back to back to back. During the Dallas Buyers Club run, I had True Detective in your living room every week. To talk about this freely, True Detective was the best campaigner for Dallas Buyers Club there was.
I'm not working that frequently right now in making movies. I've looked at a couple of scripts, but nothing that is moving me out of my chair to go, "I'm going to quit doing this and go make a movie." It's going to take something kinda special right now to make me feel like I want to leave this character that I'm playing right now in this piece of art that I'm creating.
Why was now the right time to write the book? Did turning 50 have anything to do with it?
Maybe. I suppose, inherently, it's got to have something to do with whatever ideological timeline in life you think you have. Fifty is one of those numbers. I'm not a big number guy. I’ve got friends that I still think are 40 and they're 62. I'm like, "Really? Wow, okay."
I've been daring to go write a book for 15 years. I just didn't have the courage to do it. I had a ghostwriter at the beginning, and one of the best gifts that was given to me was the editor of the newspaper he works for made a new rule that you cannot go be ghostwriters for books like this, so he was pulled off early.
I wrote him the other day. I was like, "Thank you and your boss for pulling you off, because you put it on me. You made me go, You know what? You don't need anybody to write this with you. You need to go write it, McConaughey.” Like I always say about a workout, what's the hardest part about a workout? Tying your damn shoes.
The hardest part was just gathering up all the diaries and heading to solitary confinement. Then the days just went by, and I was writing on an average of 17 to 21 hours a day. I was in a fever pitch. I laughed, I cried. It was a wonderful, wild ride. Overall it was 52 days in solitary confinement.
You write about the feeling of becoming famous overnight after A Time to Kill came out. And around that time, your public persona began to calcify: the easygoingness, the shirtlessness, the naked Bongo drumming. How much do you feel like the myth around you lines up with your true self?
A lot of it, it's just not the full picture. I am cool and easygoing. What people may not know is I work my butt off so I can relax. I prepare so I can play. I try to have my stuff taken care of so I can go, “Yeah, it’s all easy.” Other people think I'm a really, really intense person. I know I'm very intentional.
Was I the rom-com guy, the shirtless guy on the beach? Yes. And those rom-coms paid the rent at the houses on the beach where I got to be shirtless. I was like, "Hell, yes!" And I enjoyed all of it.
What I noticed was that, yes, I'm all these things, but being so identified as this is not bringing me other opportunities or other things that I am and want to do. So I took a sabbatical. I went away for a while, and I didn't know how long I'd have to be away when I stopped doing rom-coms, because the movies I wanted to do, the scripts weren't coming. There was nothing. No one was offering me the roles I wanted, I was looking for.
And it took 20 months before Matthew McConaughey as anything other than a rom-com or action-comedy guy came to me. And it was an unbranding phase, not a rebranding phase. I was away. You didn't see me shirtless on the beach. You didn't see me in the romantic comedy. "Where's McConaughey?" "I don't know." "Shit. Forget it. Who cares?" I didn't know if I'd ever work again. I thought during that time about changing careers. Maybe I'll go start playing music, be a high school football coach, a wildlife guide.
So what does it look like when Matthew McConaughey gets stressed out?
Well, I've learned over time, my trigger goes off if I'm feeling too stressed pretty quickly. And then I’m already trying to stabilize it. I don't remember the last time I truly raised my voice at someone. Because if I have to get to the point where I feel like I'm going to snap or be on edge, or I have to raise my voice, I immediately go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What have you not handled, McConaughey, that lets you get to this point?”
It takes work to maintain the relationships in our life. And if you don't work at them, you will look up and be stressed and have to do more than raise your voice in certain things. You might pull your hair out of your head. It becomes more than stress. It can become debilitating.
We're always in architecture. We're always in construction, every relationship. If I lax off and don't do the work and maintain those relationships in head and heart and spirit as best I can, it can get to moments where it's too much and I stress or have to raise my voice, or I'm lost and I'm pissed off and I'm really angry. I don't want to feel those things. I try to maintain things to do the work so then I can relax and we can whistle and sing and dance and enjoy our food at the table.
Your iconic Wolf of Wall Street scene, with the humming and the chest-pounding, is a result of how you prepare to go on camera. When and how did that become a technique of yours?
I'd done it without even consciously noting it for years. I'd always take a drum or djembe and I'm always, "[Drumming on the table] Hmmm-ba-ba-bump." And I find a tune. I got to try to find a rhythm for the scene and the character I'm in. I've got some tension, I’m a little nervous. It's early in the morning, it's cold. [Starts chest-pounding and humming]
When my voice is a little too high, it's a little too resonant right now, and that's not really my voice. How do I get it down? I’ve got to massage, I've got to get rid of the tension, loosen up my stomach. I would always start to just find rhythms [does the Wolf of Wall Street humming]. That rhythm was the one for that character. It was Leonardo's idea to go, "Dude, what's that thing you were doing before the scene?" I was like, "I'm just loosening up." And he's like, "Do that in the scene." I was like, "Sure."
If you could, what’s the number one piece of advice you’d give the younger version of yourself just starting off?
It’s not personal, it's all business. Don't take it personally. I think I got seven or 12 years into Hollywood, and it just helped me not worry about stuff I didn't need to worry about.
What did you take personally early on?
All of the "I love you”s and "Oh my God, he's doing great." You could feel it after a successful box-office hit. But then maybe the next one didn't do so well. "I love you" would go to “Oh, hi." And then another one comes out that doesn’t work. "I love you" went to "Hi" to “All of a sudden, I'm not returning your phone call.”
I took it personally. I was like, "Wait a minute. I remember you looked at me in my eyes and said, ‘I love you.’ I've said that to four people in my life, man. You don't throw those words around like that." I went, "Oh, I get it. You know what? If they love me, they love me. If they don't call back now, hey, guess what, now they're picking up the phone and they love me again.” It’s just a cycle, and ride with it.
How much do you pay attention to criticism? You've had a great streak the last eight years or so, but what about if there’s a miss here and there, say a movie like Serenity. Do you pay attention to it?
I do. I am someone who will read reviews. I did an exercise about eight years back. I had my publicists gather up all the bad reviews. And it was a thick notebook. And I went through and I sat down with all of them. What I noticed was there were some people that I could tell from the very first sentence the snark was on high. They didn't like me. This thing was going to be negative even before they saw the movie. They were in for me.
But then I also saw criticisms that were very constructive, and I was like, "This journalist has a point. What I was trying to do did not translate. Let me go back and look at that. You know what? I agree with them. Yeah, I missed that mark.”
Now, I try to find the same things in the good stuff. I've read articles that I look at and I'm going, "Well, this person's a fan of mine." And other times you look and you go, "What they liked is what I had set out to do."
They don't steer my ship. Does reading a good review that's really well written make me feel better than reading a bad one? Sure, it does.
Sure.
But that also goes into, most of us go to our diary to write about things when we're in trouble or we're lost or we're in crisis. I learned in my early 20s, make sure you're still going to your diary when things are rolling, when things are going good. We're taught so often to dissect our failures, and I believe we should definitely remember to dissect our successes. Dissect what we're doing when life's going well, dissect what we're doing when we're getting good reviews.
What's one of those things for you?
My best work has been when I am so committed to the process that all of a sudden we wrap at the end of the day and I say, "Goodbye, I'll see you tomorrow." And they tell me, "No, no, no, that's a film wrap. We're done. There is no tomorrow." I'm like, "Really?" I didn't even know.
I call them school nights, nights that we work. I don't go out. I like to stay in my own zone and come home, see my family, have dinner, have a drink, shower, get in bed, study tomorrow's work, go to sleep.
Is there a dream role you still want to play?
Yeah, the dream role I want to be now is minister of culture, MOC.
Tell me about what that means.
Minister of culture, it's a role in life. There may be a documentary made on it. I think we, as a people in society, we've lost our frequency here. Not just this year. It's been going on for a while. I think what we tell people, our definition of success that we sell people, is a little out of line. Especially in America, what we tell you what success is: Be famous and have money.
I don't think those two should be at the top of the list. I think they inherently have become at the top of the list in our society because it's the way we've handled capitalism and many other things. We all want to be relevant. Sure, but we should ask ourselves, relevant for what?
What’s gotten you to this point in your life where this feels like the most important thing to pursue?
Considering legacy choices. Seriously considering what's gonna be said at my eulogy and understanding that, well, you're writing the résumé for your eulogy right now. We all are. It's a pretty cool thing to go, "What's my eulogy going to be?"
What got you to start thinking about that?
I’ve always thought of the existential questions in life and the impermanence of life. Life's a verb. We're living it. We're the authors of our résumé that becomes our eulogy.
I think it's a cool thing to do for everyone to think about that. It's not a daunting task. One thing we all gotta get past is this thing where we don't like to just say the obvious thing and just embrace it. We're all gonna die! That turns me on. Why not? It's inevitable. I'm not going to be like, "Oh my God." What's the fun in that?
I even think the youth should understand that more. It'll help you be more present and live more now, realizing that. I think it's a good idea for people to sit down and chat and go, “What if I projected into my future self, 10 years, 20 years?" How old are you?
Thirty-one.
Thirty-one. Sit down and have a chat with your 51-year-old self. What would your 51-year-old self say to you now? What would y'all be chatting about? It's not a heavy thing. It's a fun exercise. It's a good thing to do to get an honest, objective look at who we are as subjects in our life right now.
It can be very revealing. Those questions that you have that your 51-year-old self is asking you may surprise you. Some of the places where your 51-year-old self may forgive you may be revealed.
So you’re totally comfortable with your mortality is what you’re telling me.
Yeah. I'm not looking forward to dying, but I'm like, "Hey, man. Yeah. Let's go." And understanding, I don't know, this may not be it. Is there a heaven? Is there many lives, many masters? Do we come back and learn lessons? Do we come back in the spirit form? How much do our kids make us immortal, because they live on after us? It's not for me to say. I can believe, but I sure don't know.
I have to ask, I’ve read that a few versions of your Mali wrestling story have come up over the years. How accurate is the one in the book? Did that really happen?
Of course. Is it that outrageous that you think it may be fiction?
It's pretty outrageous.
It's 100% true. It really happened, and I think back of how incredible of an adventure and experience that was and everything that came after that. It all hints to one moment, when he came and challenged me. In this ear, it was like, "No fucking way. Just stay here. You're tired. You got many excuses not to get up and engage in a wrestling match with this big guy right now."
But in this ear it goes, "You will regret it forever not knowing what happened." The little window of opportunity for that challenge came, and I could have shut it down in two seconds and would have had none of the beautiful story, the life lessons in the celestial moments in the night, sitting there in the cradle of God’s hands and thinking, "My gosh, I've found it." Then, whoosh, spitting a loogie in my face. It was beautiful.
This interview has been edited and condensed.