Three nights before Halloween, we are doing an interview with Matthew McConaughey via Zoom. He is sitting at his home in Austin, reclining, comfortable. But then his 7-year-old walks in, demanding his dad’s attention. Now.
“There’s a whole thing on fire in there!” the boy says.
What happens when a Halloween streamer dips from a chandelier and caresses the flames of a burning candle? It’s a three-word moment: Go get Dad. With the calm of an actor crushing a crisis on the silver screen, McConaughey douses the fire. Which feels appropriate, given why we’re talking to the Oscar-winning star.
The 51-year-old Uvalde native is the author of Greenlights, an unconventional memoir that has zoomed to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list. McConaughey is the son of parents who were “twice divorced, thrice married” — to each other. Whether their youngest of three sons learned it from them, or elsewhere during his extraordinary half a century on earth, he long ago got the hang of being calm and cool.
It defines him as an actor; it defines him as a man.
Not that it didn’t take on-the-job training.
He was born to parents whose relationship, he says, often felt like a stormy tidal wave. “It was passionately rocky, big swings up and down. They loved hard,” he says.
Greenlights recounts one moment in his parents’ tempestuous marriage when “around and around they went, until finally, Mom’s frustration turned to fatigue. Now covered in ketchup, she dropped the knife on the floor, stood straight, and began to wipe her tears and catch her breath. Dad dropped the bottle of Heinz, relaxed out of his matador pose, and wiped the blood dripping from his nose with his forearm.”
It’s telling to read what came next for the mother who “beat two types of cancer on nothing more than aspirin and denial” and the father who played football for Paul “Bear” Bryant at the University of Kentucky before ascending to the Green Bay Packers.
So how did Mom and Dad make up? They made love on the floor.
In 2012, McConaughey married Camila Alves, with whom he has three children, ages 12, 10 and 7. Theirs is a dad who can be counted on to remain calm and cool and quell problems quickly, without anger. Theirs is a dad who revels in a relationship with his wife that is, well, different from the one his parents shared.
“I’ll take more of a smooth, moving river with some rapids that will still give me a buzz and still keep us passionate,” he says. “And no, I don’t want the tidal wave of ups and downs that my parents had.”
Stories from a dramatic childhood sound at times like a rehearsal for the brilliant career that followed, leading all the way to the stage of the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. There, in March of 2014, McConaughey won the Oscar for his portrayal of Ron Woodroof, a cowboy diagnosed with AIDS, in his breakout film, Dallas Buyers Club.
“You see the humanity, and they’re love stories to me,” he says of his parents. “My mother would never say she was battered. She started all those fights.”
On paper, “If you lay out the facts of the actions that happened, you’d say, ‘This is a horror story. Call Child Protective Services!’ ‘Oh, my, you must have had therapy to get over this.’ None of that’s true, and the reason I think I tell those stories is that, 95% of the time, ours was a warm, cuddly family. I share in the book stories of discipline and violence because, for me, those are the times when the love that was so apparent, and so true, was tested the most.”
Still, he would say to himself, “If it’s going to break, this is when it happens. They will end up being divorced. But they always ended up married. The fight on the kitchen floor, that was bloody. But where does it end up? They make love on the kitchen floor. Love always trumped it. We were a family where you could not hold a grudge. Could not go to bed upset with anyone. You did not leave a situation unless everyone hugged it out. There were times when the love was tested — but never defeated.”
McConaughey learned “not to judge” family members, nor does he judge “the characters I play. I have a thick skin for how I see humanity. And I look for that in every character I play.” The word, he says, is insight, never judgment. If you judge a character, he says, you will end up with a truly lousy performance.
Colleagues and friends have learned to appreciate McConaughey’s calm and how his mantra of insight over judgment extends also to them. Actress Jennifer Garner, his co-star in Dallas Buyers Club, tells the story of how he astutely picked up on her own worst moment during filming. As a new mom, she was breastfeeding, but the shooting schedule was so crazy-intense, she had no time to breastfeed or pump.
“I started crying and I was like, ‘I have to quit. I have to go home, I need to be with my kids. I just can’t do this anymore,’ " she said recently on the PBS show, Tell Me More with Kelly Corrigan. “Sweet Matthew McConaughey pulled me aside and said, ‘What is going on with you?’ And from then on, whenever I needed to, I would give him a ‘hi’ sign and I would go take care of it. He said, ‘You can do both. You’ve got it. You can do it.’ "
“How much do I love that guy? I know, a lot,” Garner said.
Greenlights benefits most of all from this: For 35 years, McConaughey wrote in a diary his most searing moments, which go a long way toward making it the rare book it is. As he writes near the beginning, “This is not a traditional memoir … This is not an advice book, either. Although I like preachers, I’m not here to preach and tell you what to do.”
Along the way, he learned how to laugh. Humor, he writes, has been “one of my great teachers. It has helped me deal with pain, loss, and lack of trust.”
Years of keeping a diary also enabled learning, as he writes in the book: “How to be a good man. How to get what I want. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.”
“I’ll take an a------ over a dork any day,” he says in our pre-Halloween chat. “At least I know where they stand. At least, they stand for something, whereas the dork is trying to be everything to everybody. They don’t stand for anything, so I don’t really trust them.
“A good man understands that decisions carry consequences. If you choose the path of least resistance the whole time — being a nice guy — you’re a nobody. You’ve got to have things you stand for, which doesn’t mean taking the easy path. It often means the harder path, the least popular path.”
His own career underscores the philosophy.
He grew bone-tired of appearing in too many romantic comedies, so much so that he drew a line in the sand and began to say no to “rom coms” — even one that offered a whopping $14.5 million as a come-on. He held out for 20 months, staking out a bold new path with roles in The Lincoln Lawyer, Killer Joe, Magic Mike, Mud, Dallas Buyers Club and HBO’s True Detective.
“It was an un-branding phase,” he says. “But I didn’t rebrand. I was gone.”
His exile came at a time when "I was falling in love with the woman who is now my wife. I kept saying to myself, ‘Your life feels a lot more vital than your work does.’ I kept thinking, ‘I wish I could do some work that would challenge the vitality of the life I’m living and of the man I’m becoming.’ "
It meant enforcing his own sense of determination, which came as naturally to his parents as breathing.
McConaughey was 9 when his family moved from Uvalde to Longview in the Piney Woods. (He’s a proud 1988 graduate of Longview High School.) He and his dad were housed in a double-wide trailer when Matthew discovered that his father’s beloved cockatiel appeared to be dead, floating in the toilet.
When his dad got home, he refused to accept that the bird was gone. What ensues is one of the best stories Greenlights uncorks and one of its best-written: His father, frantically, desperately, gave the bird mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
It worked.
“She was dead,” McConaughey writes. “Now she was alive. Lucky lived another eight years.”
As for his dad, “The same hands you see being violent, in those stories with my mother, they were hands that could heal.” His son remembers “the power of his hands on this little cockatiel and the tears just streaming down his face. Damn if he didn’t put that cockatiel’s head in his mouth. I mean, that bird was dead. It was not flipping. It was spinning in the bottom of the toilet. It was done. And he brought it back to life.”
Following the example set by his dad, McConaughey has long felt protective of the underdog, on screen and in life. “I got that from him, whether it was learning to appreciate the nerd on the front row in school that got picked on or the short Black kid — people would call him a runt and pop him — or the one Gothic girl in our school that everyone thought was a lesbian. I was student council, athlete, most handsome, all those things. I would bring those kids to the popular party and introduce them. To this day, I still work my best from an underdog position, when I’ve got something to prove.”
Right now is such a moment. He’s currently immersed in a two-year break from acting. His profession is changing. Radically. It may be that the destiny of feature films will confine them to walls in people’s homes, powered by 5G speed and 8K streaming. The thrill of sitting in the dark with strangers in a crowded theater may be gone. He doesn’t know and we don’t either.
But rather than wax wistful or angry, he’s like a running back looking for a new path of light. He speaks openly of coaching a high school football team or conducting an orchestra. Heck, in a Tuesday interview, he refused to rule out running for governor of Texas, though he walked things back the next day on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, saying he had “no plans to do that right now.”
He loves cheering on his alma mater’s gridiron warriors, the Texas Longhorns, and serving as a professor to UT students in the class Script to Screen, which is already a sought-after staple in the Moody College of Communication. Professor Scott Rice, who teaches the class with McConaughey, says that when he “first spoke to Matthew, it was clear to me that he’d spent years thinking about the class.”
The actor offers his latest film for students to study each semester and encourages its director to visit the class. “Script to Screen really is one of the most unique film classes in the country because students — all of whom sign NDAs — study the production of a film in real time, while it is still being produced,” Rice says.
As for the mark McConaughey leaves on students, Rice says that, at first, “they’re struck by how down to earth he is. They are surprised to see how genuinely invested he is in their future. After that, I think they are focused on what they can learn from him.
“My impression of Matthew from the start was that he’s a gifted teacher,” Rice says. “He has this laser-focused precision when he talks about subjects like the actor/director relationship. He offers specific examples, often in the form of real-life experiences. Matthew’s also tremendously empathetic, and that goes a long way as a college professor. He once sat in the chairs of our students, literally, as a film student himself in the early ’90s. That makes him an expert on their hopes and dreams, and what they most want to know.”
When it comes to his own hopes and dreams, the McConaughey of 2020 sees only one role, and he’s playing it now.
“I want to create my favorite parts in life. That’s what I’m chasing,” he says. “I’m probably going to act again, but it’s going to take a plum part.”
Besides, you never know when you might be needed to put out a fire.
