18 The Times Magazine
libertarians” with a reverence for the Old
Testament and a mistrust, verging on
contempt, for government and the law.
He was “a Momma’s boy” and she taught
him to walk into every room like he owned
it. He grew up in awe of his much older
brothers, Rooster and Pat. Their big-hearted
father, who was always hustling, who sent
hired heavies to convey death threats to his
debtors and dreamt of opening a Florida
gumbo shack if he could just “hit a lick” big
enough to retire, was a man to be feared and
loved at the same time.
The family’s finances were generally
precarious but they enjoyed a sudden lift in
the early Eighties. Jim McConaughey moved
the family out of the trailer where they had
been living into a house. “All of a sudden, he
had 70 employees under him.”
Pretty soon they had a half-share in a tan
and dark brown Lear jet, with a matching jet
boat (“So Texan, right?”) and, of course, his
mother “had her mink coat and her Fleetwood
Cadillac”. McConaughey grins. “Now, did we
own all those things?” He bursts into hoarse
laughter. “I don’t know.”
Despite the violence and sometimes brutal
discipline of his childhood there’s an irresistible
warmth to the McConaugheys as he describes
them. “In our family, we love really hard. We
get angry really well. We cry it out if we’re
sad. If you got a problem, you lay it out. We’re
really transparent. And no one makes up any
damn drama. We’re a resilient, brush-it-off
family.” If something flares up it gets tackled
head on. It always has. “No going to bed with
a grudge. No going to bed mad... We work
this thing out.
“McConaugheys turn the page and I found
the world doesn’t do that nearly as much.”
They also love a tall tale, he concedes. Just
how reliable a narrator is he? “I’m much more
reliable than anyone else in my family!”
Jim McConaughey had always told his
children, “Boys, when I go, I’m gonna be
makin’ love to your mother.” He was right.
It happened one morning in 1992 and proved
a turning point in his youngest son’s life, the
moment he realised that there was “no safety
net” for him any more. McConaughey was
studying film in Austin at the time, after
dropping long-held plans to become a lawyer.
A few nights earlier he had shot his first
professional scene as an actor: an improvised
performance in Richard Linklater’s Dazed
and Confused. He’d joined the shoot
mid-production after scoring an audition
accidentally thanks to a chance meeting with
the casting director in a bar. It took another
three years for McConaughey’s big break to
arrive, the male lead opposite Sandra Bullock
in the legal drama A Time to Kill. It made him
famous overnight.
Characteristically, “pretty doggone soon”
after the film’s release, he hiked to a remote
monastery in the New Mexico desert and
shut himself away from the world to recover.
“If anything’s consistent when I look back
through the stories of my life it’s that when
my spirit was shaking, or when I was lost, I’ve
done a pretty good job of going, ‘All right, I’m
pulling the parachute. I’m out of here.’ ”
Two years later he needed another course
correction after an “18-month hedonism tour”
living as a leather-trousered semi-nocturnal
resident of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset
Boulevard. He rebalanced himself, as not
many other A-listers would, by backpacking
alone through rural Mali for a month, during
which he accepted – and survived – a fight
with a village wrestling champion.McConaughey’s biggest ambition remained
out of reach. “The one thing I knew I always
wanted to be was a father. That’s been mymain dream. That has always been, like, well- you made it.”
He met Camila Alves in 2005. Her parents
had also married and divorced each other
twice; they just hadn’t married a third time
as his had. She knew exactly who she was
and McConaughey was blown away. They
moved into his Airstream together at the
Malibu Beach trailer park.
Levi, Vida and Livingstone McConaughey
arrived over the next seven years (one of
them wanders in and out of the frame a few
times while we’re talking), and in 2012 he
and Alves were married by the monk who’d
counselled him at the New Mexico monastery
in 1996.
At Alves’s insistence the family have always
gone with him on location.
He’s talked to a lot of “very successful
people” in Hollywood about this, household
names, and “none of them did it how we
do it”. Every one of them chose to let their
children stay at school, with their friends,
rather than bring them with them on location.
“Every one of them said they’d do it different
if they could go back.”
It’s not the only instance of McConaughey
picking his heroes’ brains. When he was
younger he sought advice from Paul Newman
and Warren Beatty.
“Newman was great. We went in his
office and played pool. [He calls him “Mr
Newman”.] We hung out and he asked me,
‘What do you want to know from me?’ I’m
like, ‘Uuuugh... I really admire you. I’m just
hoping to hear a bit of the lay of the land.’
Anyway, the best advice he gave me is, as
I was leaving and I was shutting his door, he
goes, ‘Hey!’ and I push it back, look in and he
goes, ‘Give ’em hell!’ ”
Beatty told him to do “a version of what
I’m doing now [with the book and its lack of
filters]. He was like, ‘Direct now! Before you’re
ready. You get older. You get tired.’ ”
There’s no sign of McConaughey flagging
yet. He wants to keep getting “carried
away with the right things”. At the moment
that’s promoting the book, doing more
writing, working on a values campaign
for his beloved University of Texas (where
he’s now a professor teaching a film course
of his own devising), working with his
football team (he’s co-owner of a new
Major League Soccer franchise), doing
more car and bourbon adverts and growing
his and Alves’s foundation for disadvantaged
high school children.
“And as far as acting in front of the camera,I’ll do more of that. But right now? That
sounds pretty damn boring.”
There are no great regrets. Plunging back
into his past he has discovered that he likes
his younger self more than he expected to,
and the things that he thought he would be
embarrassed about mostly turned out to be
funny instead. “I saw a young man questioning
certain things that I have more answers to
now. But as you know, when you find out the
answers, all it does is open up more questions.”
At the end of his book is the most
enjoyable “About the author” section I’ve
ever come across.
“Matthew feels at home in the world,”
it states. “A crooner, a talented whistler, a
wrestler, a prescriptive etymologist and a
world traveller... He has won six water-
drinking competitions worldwide, says his
prayers before meals because it makes the
food taste better, is a great nickname giver,
studies gastronomy and architecture, loves
cheeseburgers and dill pickles, has been
learning to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and enjoys a good
cry once a week at church.”
The very last line is enigmatic poetry- “Matthew prefers sunsets to sunrises” – so
I ask what it means.
On the other end of the Zoom call
Matthew McConaughey, “a self-proclaimed
fortunate man”, starts cackling immediately.
“I heard that the other day too! And I was
like, did I say that? I have said that.” He
pauses, and smiles. “I do prefer sunsets to
sunrises. Because I like to have a lot of fun
after the sun goes down.” n
‘ACTING? I’LL DO MORE OF THAT. BUT RIGHT
NOW? THAT SOUNDS PRETTY DAMN BORING’