16 The Times Magazinethe battle with coronavirus, while “quarantining
pretty hard” at home in Austin, Texas – where
he is now – with his Brazilian wife, Camila,
their three children and his 88-year-old
mother, who still goes to bed later then him
and gets up earlier most days.
McConaughey’s unofficial public service
announcements, delivered in his trademark
oddball Texan shaman style, have racked up
millions of views on social media. He’s gone
viral with a video shot on his property in which
he appears as a cowboy bounty hunter called
“Bobby Bandito”, who teaches Americans how
to make a pandemic mask out of a bandana,
coffee filters and rubber bands. He has
interviewed Dr Anthony Fauci. He has hosted
a virtual bingo night for an old people’s home.
He has also written Greenlights.
The process began in May 2019, when he
spent 12 days alone at a remote desert cabin
near the Mexican border with the diaries he
has been keeping since he was 15. He took
a cooler of food and drink, a printer and a
generator for when it got dark. There was a
mountain that he could climb to get phone
reception and say good night to his family.
At about 9pm on the night of the fourth
day he wrote, “This should not feel like a
book that Matthew McConaughey should’ve
written. This must feel like a book that only
Matthew McConaughey could have written.”
The book is “not an escape plan” from
his acting career, but it is an attempt to be
more “unfiltered”.
When he acts, “There is somebody else’s
script [and it’s] directed by someone else,
lensed through a camera by someone else
and edited by someone else.” He holds up four
fingers to the screen, almost angrily. “That’s
four filters from my raw expression right
there.” (He does a lot of raw expressing.)
A book, on the other hand, is only one filter.
It’s thought out and planned, which makes
it a departure of sorts for McConaughey, a
freewheeling kind of a guy who would, I suspect,
gladly perform his story spontaneously and in
person for every single reader if he could.
Writing cramped his style at first. “You don’t
have my raised eyebrow,” he says, raising his
eyebrow. “You don’t have my innuendo. You
don’t have my lilt.” But then he found that it
was fun to wake up in the morning, wait three
hours for his first sentence to come to him
and know that when it did – he bangs on the
desk, clicks his fingers and says, “Whooooosh!”
and then, “Rrrraaaoooww!” – he would be up
and running.
The finished work is unmistakeably a “book
that only Matthew McConaughey could have
written”. This is a good thing.
The very first sentence reads, “This is
not a traditional memoir,” and you would
be hard pressed to find another Hollywood
autobiography containing anywhere nearthis many handscrawled notes, cheesy bumper
stickers, typed meditations, camping yarns, wet
dreams deciphered as omens, newly hatched
aphorisms and enlightening lessons from Texas
college sports coaches. Or this few Hollywood
anecdotes. McConaughey dismisses his
big night at the Academy awards in two
sentences: “They called my name. I won the
Oscar for best actor.” He devotes five pages to
a single night drinking with strangers in a bar
in the Montana countryside.
This turns out to make perfect sense
because, probably uniquely in the annals of
Hollywood, McConaughey reveals that he
spent over three years in the late Nineties
holding down a career as a leading man while
living alone with his rescue dog, Ms Hud, in
motorhome parks all over America.
He had postal addresses in two favoured
campsites, a BlackBerry for his emails, a
satellite dish for the internet connection
and a microphone for recording his many,
many, many thoughts.
He also carried a gun and a baseball bat,
just in case, but never needed them.
If a director or producer was keen to hire
him McConaughey would persuade them
to fly into a nearby city and they’d have the
meeting on the road while he drove them tothe next airport. If he was working on a film- Steven Spielberg’s Amistad in Rhode Island,
for instance – he’d drive to the location and
find a local trailer park to set up camp.
“People thought I was roughing it. I wasn’t.
I mean, the inside of my Airstream, I tricked
it out and it was beautiful. I had one of
everything. I had a really good stove; I had just
the kind of coffee I liked. I had great sheets
on my queen-size bed. I had my dog. I had my
favourite plate, my favourite knife and fork.”
Every now and then he’d treat himself
to a few nights at a Holiday Inn, or the MGM
Grand in Las Vegas, or the Four Seasons in
Beverly Hills, but he’d soon be itching for
his trailer and the open road again. “Smaller
spaces, in a lot of ways, help you be more free.”
Sometimes he’d drive all day, park up at
night and only realise the next day where he
was. He awoke to a grizzly bear drinking from
a river outside his trailer. Once he unwittingly
parked 4ft from a railway track. “All of a
sudden I wake up – ‘What the hell’s going
on?’ There’s a train going by.”
More often, “I’d look at the map for the
day and say: you know, it’s about one o’clock.
I want to have an easy night. Sundown will be
around seven. I’ll pull in around five and start
a fire, marinate a steak, make a cocktail. So
I’m just going to look what’s four hours down
the road, pick out a place.” He would ignore
the big chains of the trailer park world in
favour of quirkier, independent establishments - “JR’s Getaway or so and so”.
“I met Million Milers, man, who had been
out there for a million miles.” He’d ask them,
“What do you regret?” and they’d always say,
“We didn’t do it sooner.” There were “retired
couples, young outlaws on the run. Stayed in
a trailer park in Austin. My neighbour was a
professional clown and the guy to the left of
me was an Eighties cover band guitarist.
“There’s a whole other book of trailer park
stories, for sure.”
In the memoir he calls his trailer park
years, “acting and storytelling 101, a front-row
seat to real characters in real life”. He
didn’t just want to find “real behaviour”
for professional reasons, though.
The wandering was a part of his response
to becoming globally famous, he says. “I was
looking for strangers to meet again. I was
looking to see how many people I could still
find that did not recognise me. And secondly,
I was looking for people that did recognise me,
but didn’t really give a damn.”
McConaughey comes from a “long line of
rule breakers”, he writes, a family of “outlawHIS PUBLIC SERVICE VIDEOS DURING COVID HAVE
RACKED UP MILLIONS OF SOCIAL MEDIA VIEWS
With Rory Cochrane in Dazed and Confused, 1993Showing America how to make a Covid maskSHUTTERSTOCK, MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY/INSTAGRAM