“Simon!” Matthew McConaughey barks. “How do, sir?!” Matthew McConaughey could not be more Matthew McConaughey if he tried. And he’s only said four words. Charming, sincere, intense, 100% Texan and 101% eccentric.
Five years ago, the Oscar-winning actor wrote a memoir called Greenlights. It wasn’t a conventional memoir, more a collection of life lessons, bullet-point anecdotes and gnomic philosophies. Now he has written a book of poetry called Poems & Prayers. For McConaughey, the two are interchangeable. It’s another memoir of sorts – this time, a portrait of his faith and its impact on his everyday life. In it he addresses faith in the broadest sense. There’s plenty of talking to God as he searches for the divine in himself, loads of Amens, but it’s also about faith in himself, his family, his career, the world, the works.
The gospel according to Matthew advocates a world of relentless positivity that rejects the concepts of hate or “can’t”; a world of conservative discipline and traditional family values. But of course, this being McConaughey, it’s also a creed in permanent tension with earthly delights and soiled realities, where he misses his own birthday party because he’s so stoned that he sits in his car listening to a Janet Jackson song 32 times in a row, where his God-fearing parents beat the living crap out of each other, and his dad shags himself to death one early morning at the age of 62. As a rounded philosophy, I can’t pretend to make sense of it all. I’m not sure that McConaughey does, but he has a good go.
His earliest poems are written as an 18-year-old taking a gap year in Australia as a Rotary Club exchange student. Already, he says, he was pushing the existential envelope. “I was on my own and I didn’t have any of my friends to bounce stuff off. The conversations were all Socratic, with myself. I was a foreign man in a foreign land. Quite lonely. And I was trying to make sense of the world, trying to make sense of my home. Trying to make sense of Texas and life.”
What was he struggling with? “I was asking similar questions then as I am now. What are we calling success? What are we rewarding people and ourselves for in this life? What are we chasing? What are we living for? Is it just money and fame? And this is before I had any money and fame. I was already questioning that. Character and integrity meant a lot to me then. I was calling out what I saw as the mendacities of the world.” At the heart of his personal battle is learning to distinguish between McConaughey the nice guy and McConaughey the good man. The nice guy is liked by everyone and conflict-averse; the good man is values-driven, takes a stance, and is going to piss some people off along the way.
McConaughey has had three distinct stages in his movie career. First, there was the indie kid in his early 20s who worked with directors such as Richard Linklater in Dazed and Confused and John Sayles in Lone Star. It was in Dazed and Confused that he made his name as drawling stoner extraordinaire David Wooderson, a twentysomething perpetual adolescent who still hangs around with high-school students. His catchphrases: “Alright, alright, alright” (the first words he ever said in a movie) and “You just gotta keep livin’, man. L.I.V.I.N.” entered the indie movie lexicon and have been linked with McConaughey ever since.
Surprisingly, he then became a conventional leading man in mainstream movies, playing lawyers in courtroom procedurals (A Time to Kill, Amistad) and smooth-chested, smooth-talking heart-throbs in romcoms (The Wedding Planner, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past).
Then, in 2011, came the much celebrated third stage when McConaughey gave free rein to his quirkiness, inhabiting a series of memorable off-the-wall characters. In other hands, they might have been too far-fetched, but somehow he managed to make them utterly convincing. Every outlandish idiosyncrasy rang true – from homophobic rodeo cowboy turned Aids activist Ron Woodroof saving the lives of gay men in Dallas Buyers Club to unhinged hedonist stockbroker Mark Hanna in The Wolf of Wall Street and inscrutable nihilist Rust Cohle in True Detective. And then there were the physical transformations. In Dallas Buyers Club, for which he won the best actor Oscar in 2014, he lost about 45lb to play the Aids-emaciated Woodroof; in Gold he gained about the same amount by guzzling cheeseburgers and beer to play corpulent prospector Kenny Wells; and for Magic Mike he got rid of virtually all his body fat to play superbuff strip-club owner Dallas. This stage of his career became known as the McConaissance, and is ongoing.
Today he is speaking via video link from his home in Austin, Texas. I’m warned by the publicist that we cannot show footage from the interview because McConaughey is not “camera ready”. Camera ready or not, he’s looking pretty good. Trim, clean-shaven, younger than his 55 years but not ridiculously so. He’s sipping from a huge bottle of honey-based kombucha.
While studying for a degree in radio, television and film at the University of Texas at Austin, he was cast by Linklater in Dazed and Confused. It was meant to be a much smaller role, but the director was so taken by his ability to improvise he expanded the part. As for McConaughey, he never assumed acting would be more than a fun hobby. So what did he think he would do with his life at the point he started writing poetry in Australia? “I believed my calling was to become a monk.” Would he have made a good one? He pauses. “Yeasssss. I would have made a good monk. I revere dedication, a life that dedicates itself to God, that sees God in every natural thing, at all times.” But he says he thinks he would have missed out on too much stuff. I expect him to talk about sex and stimulants. But no. “I had long talks about it with a Benedictine monk friend of mine who’s now an abbot at a monastery, and he said: ‘Nononononononoonono, you’re a communicator, you’re a storyteller, do not go to live a hermetic life. You need to communicate and tell stories. That is a gift you have been given. Do not dampen that gift or put a blanket on that gift by becoming a monk or hermit.’” At times he sounds like God’s own cowboy; vowels elongating and contracting by the syllable, one word gliding into the next, gloriously unpunctuated, sentences flowing like a raging river.
He started writing at a time he felt his Christian faith challenged. “I found myself looking at the world around me and not finding evidence of things I want to believe in. I didn’t want to quit believing, but I was looking at how we’re treating each other, the low barometer of trust, and there seemed to be a sense of win at any cost. It doesn’t matter how you did it, just win. I became a little cynical. And then I was like: ‘How dare you, you arrogant, entitled prick.’ That is a disease. Cynicism is, I believe, a disease.”
McConaughey grew up in Texas with two older brothers to Methodist parents. His father, James, who struggled with alcoholism, made fortunes in the oil-pipe supply business and lost them. His mother, Kay, was a teacher. Both were tough disciplinarians, though they didn’t necessarily practise what they preached.
I’ve read so many improbable stories about his parents that I assume they must be apocryphal. For example, that they both got married three times – to each other. “Yep. Yep. Married three times, divorced twice. They never married anyone else. As far as I know there was never anybody else besides the two of them. I just think they needed some breaks from each other.” Having said that, his mother told him recently that she knew his fellow actor and good friend Woody Harrelson’s father, a convicted contract killer, and that she befriended him in one of her breaks from McConaughey’s father. This has led to rumours (admittedly started by McConaughey and Harrelson) that they are half-brothers.
It was only a few years ago that he learned about his parents’ triplicate marriage, he says. “I was around 13 the second time they got divorced. I thought Mom was having an extended vacation in Florida. Ha ha ha!” He rocks with laughter. “Dad and I were living in the trailer park.”
Is it true that his mother broke three fingers attacking his father? “Noooooooo!” he says, outraged at the suggestion. “The same finger. The middle one each time. ‘Pop! Pop!! Pop!!! Pop!!!!’” He imitates her, poking his father’s head with maximum force. “‘Katie, stop! KATIE, STOP!’” Then he makes a crunching noise. “And her finger would go.” In Greenlights, he describes his mother going for his father with a 12in chef’s knife having already broken his nose, and him retaliating with a bottle of Heinz ketchup.
And yet they adored each other. His father always said he’d like to die making love to Kay. And, sure enough, he got his wish. “When I got that call it was a Monday afternoon, and I was in Austin and they were in Houston. Mom said: ‘Your dad has moved on,’ but she didn’t tell me on the initial call how. When I got back she told me. They hauled him out on the gurney and they tried to cover him up, and my mom’s in the driveway, and she pulled the sheet off him. It was 7.30am. My understanding is that they made love that morning about 6.30am and as soon as they finished having sex he had a heart attack.” What’s the relevance of pulling the sheet back – did that make it obvious how he died? “It didn’t make it obvious. But my mom wasn’t into standing on ceremony. ‘That’s Big Jim, he’s gonna go out how he went. Don’t be trying to cover up how he went out. He’s in his birthday suit and he’s right there. Don’t be covering that man up!’”
Big Jim and Kay were staunch Christians. “It wasn’t heavy-duty fire and brimstone. But consequences were a big thing. From my mom and dad you got expectations. There was fear of disobeying and doing wrong.” What kind of things? “Respect. Not talking back. Making an effort. You couldn’t say ‘can’t’ or ‘hate’. Hate and can’t were like cuss words in our household. You could say ‘cunt’ but you couldn’t say ‘can’t’.”
He remembers the day he learned the word “hate” at school. “It sounded like a grownup word to me. Kind of edgy. And my older brother did something to me on my own birthday, I can’t remember what, and I said: ‘I hate you,’ and I remember my mom stopping the birthday party and grabbing me and saying: ‘Don’t you ever, ever say that word, especially about a family member.’” As for “can’t”, it simply wasn’t in Big Jim’s vocabulary. “If I said I can’t do something, he would always say: ‘Aren’t you just having trouble?’ My weekend chore was to do the lawn and one morning I’d been pulling on the lawnmower and the damn thing wouldn’t start. I went inside and said: ‘Dad, I can’t get the lawnmower started,’ and he looked up. He’d hear that word, and you’d see him start twitching. He didn’t say a word, walked with me out of the kitchen to the back. He tried to start the lawnmower, but it wouldn’t start. He went down, unhooked a couple of things and started it. He calmly got up, looked me in the eye and said: ‘You see, son, you were just having trouble!’ Beautiful thing.”
If McConaughey was struggling with his faith when he went to Australia at 18, it’s not surprising. Greenlights is a manifesto for positivity as much as a memoir. At one point he describes some of the bad things he has experienced to make the point that ultimately they still didn’t dent his outlook on life. Two of the lowlights are shocking – he was blackmailed into having sex for the first time at the age of 15, and he was molested by a man when he was 18 while knocked unconscious in the back of a van. Both revelations are dealt with in bullet points and never referred to again.
I tell him I want to discuss something serious from Greenlights, and begin to quote from the book. Before I complete the sentence he’s cackling. “Ha ha ha ha! I knew that was coming. Ha ha ha ha!” His response makes me feel parental. Well, Matthew McConaughey, I say, it’s easy to be glib about this, but I don’t believe the reality was anything like that. He stops laughing: “Well, that may be how you received it. There was never any intent to be glib. There was absolute intent, absolute intent, to be terse and concise because I know, and you know, that if I go into that story then or now that’s the headline. That’s why I won’t tell the details now, either.”
I’m not interested in the details, I say, I’m interested in the impact the incidents had on you. “Well, OK, did it crush some innocence of mine, that my nice guy, young Matthew, believed in the innocence of the world and no one would try to do harm to me or anyone else unless I provoked it? Did it step on my innocence that the first intimacy would be beautiful and innocent and natural? Sure.” The assault in the van is beyond terrifying, I say. “Oh, yeah, and I got out relatively unscathed. It could have been worse is what I’m saying. Talk about divine intervention. I remember waking up [in the van], and it was right before it could have been worse. That idea of the dangers of the world that are out there, about being aware, where to be, where not to be, how not to get into dicey situations, being aware of your zone, yeah. I look back and go, there are things I could have done differently to not have ended up in that situation.” He whistles, to himself more than me. It’s a long, pained whistle of relief – a wordless acknowledgment that somehow he survived. “To be more aware and wise; good man, not nice guy.”
Both incidents – perhaps the second in particular – jolted him into a recognition of the realities of the world. “We’re going to go from innocence to naivety to scepticism and we’re going to stop there because we’re not going to go to cynicism. OK, let’s be a little bit more sceptical.” And now he has become McConaughey the preacher man, delivering a turbo-charged, profoundly felt one-to-one sermon. “We have to admit the evil and the doubt that’s in the world. We have to admit it’s out there, and it’s inside us. And then choose to believe in something better or not; to make the choice, to say that I’m going to chase faith instead of lie down to doubt. I didn’t go: ‘Woe be me, the world is a bad place.’ There are bad agents, and I guess we’ve all got a bad agent in our suit. So let me shake hands with that, look in the mirror, but also choose – do my best to choose – a higher road. I’m going to pick something that’s more selfish. I think ultimately that is more selfish, especially if there is a heaven. If we believe that what we do here has to do with where we end up, and again I don’t know, wouldn’t that be the most selfish way to act? And if there’s not, Simon, I still believe it’s better for me, it’s improving my life while I’m here on Earth in this way.” In other words, acting nobly is truly selfish because it leads to a better outcome whether you have faith or not.
Was the abduction a defining experience in his life? “Simon, it was defining in ways that I don’t even understand.” It sounds as if you were incredibly lucky to get away alive, I say. “Yes. I’ve never felt as helpless as in that moment. I’ve never felt so vulnerable and unable to do anything about it. That was a nightmare.” I won’t ask about the details, I say, but how did you get away. “I escaped,” he says.
It’s hard to know where to go after a conversation like that, so we return to the poems. Revel in the Post is a lovely sensual verse that concludes: “And even on a hot summer evening you can smell October / through the sweat where you left the windows open and forgot to shave.” It sounds like a memory, I say. He smiles. “It was a particular wonderful night with my wife.”
Some of the poems are love letters to his wife, the model and entrepreneur Camila Alves, thinly disguised as daft instructional ditties. One goes: “Best thing you can do for your marriage. / One way to surely get ahead. / Is get rid of that king-size mattress. / And sleep in a queen-size bed.” Is that, by any chance, based on personal experience? He laughs. “You want success, it starts with the engineering. Just get a smaller bed. We have kids, right, and we saw this bed that this friend had, which was two king-size beds put next to each other, and all the kids were sleeping in it, and we were like: ‘Dude that’s great. So we did that, and it was great. The kids would come in, everyone had room to sleep, but then the kids quit sleeping in the bed, and I’m over here by my side table and 18ft over there is Camila with her side table and we’re like [he shouts], ‘Nighhhhhhht!’ And you wake up in the morning and you got, like, 20ft between you and this is not good for our marriage. So we got rid of it and got a queen-size bed and we’re snuggling up to each other. This was genius. Much better.”
Alongside the poems are musings about modern life and mini polemics. At one point, he writes: “So many of us today are out to prove that the truth is just an outdated nostalgic notion, that honesty, along with being correct and right, is now a deluded currency in our cultural economy. With an epidemic of half-cocked logic and illusions being sold as sound conclusions, it’s more than hard to know what to believe in; it’s hard to believe. But I don’t want to quit believing, and I don’t want to stop believing in … humanity, you, myself, our potential.”
I assume you’re talking about Trump, I say. “In the name of progress are we going to throw out every tried-and-tested truth of the past?” he says elliptically. “I don’t think that’s real progress.” So is he referring to Trump? “Wellllll, there’s something inherently there for sure. I don’t know what to believe in those pep rallies that they hold. I’ve been around politics and politicians enough to see and hear that the score is not always what they say it is; that they don’t keep the score accurately.”
Does Trump’s disregard for the truth concern him? “Well, sure it concerns me. But that’s nothing new, either. You can go back and there are many things to question over decades and centuries about what the truth was. Trump’s going about things in a different way than other politicians have. It’s direct. He’s cutting out the middle man.”
But, McConaughey says, his comments about lost values are not simply directed at politicians. “It’s also about the parents I’m around. I talk to fathers and I think: ‘What are you teaching your children? You don’t know. Don’t do that! That’s not what your child needs now!’” What kind of things is he talking about? “I see parents becoming best mates with their child when they’re very young, so it’s very simpatico between them. It’s not about right or wrong. But that child is trying to learn from you, that child doesn’t understand the concept of character, and how to become a good young man or woman.”
Now he’s on a roll. “Delayed gratification, I believe, is one of the most important things you can teach a child. I’m noticing that more and more adults are giving no value to delayed gratification or sacrifice. And if we do that we miss out on real value, real profit.” So many young people today, he says, lack a sense of shame. “I think you’ve got to have guilt. Please! Embarrassment. I wish people were a little bit more embarrassed these days. People aren’t embarrassed!” And his voice rises with anger, or disappointment, as he preaches from that imaginary pulpit. “‘You don’t mind that you half-assed that situation so poorly? This your best effort, really? I would be embarrassed.’ Guilt. You’ve gotta have some guilt. I think it’s a very healthy thing, to a certain extent.” Where does his sense of guilt come from? “Shoot! I don’t know. I’m Irish, if that’s anything to do with it.”
In recent years, McConaughey has expressed an interest in going into politics. “It’s something I started thinking about six years ago. The reason I’m not diving into it presently is I want to do my best to get three kids out of the house. But I’m fascinated with politics.” What party would he be aligned to? “It could be an independent party.”
So much of what he believes in goes back to that recurrent question in his poetry – what makes a good man as opposed to a nice guy? When he looks back at himself as a young man, he sees a nice guy who had to do some growing. He did some of it on solitary trips to the Amazon and Mali in the 1990s. “I put myself in these very monk-like situations to force myself to deal with myself.” But he still had plenty of growing to do. In 1999, he was arrested at 2.45am for playing bongos naked while under the influence of marijuana. The drug charges were dropped, but he was fined $50 for disturbing the peace.
And then there was the time in his 30s, before he got together with Camila, when he was so stoned that he missed his own birthday party. What happened? “I’d smoked the wrong weed. Well, not the wrong weed. The heavy stuff that weed has become. My friends had rented this place for dinner, and I’m imploding from the wacky weed and decide it’s a really good idea to listen to Janet Jackson’s That’s the Way Love Goes, 32 f-ing times in my car, and by the time I went in everyone was gone. I missed my own birthday party.” Did he smoke less after that? “Yeah, exactly. And I like that song, but I don’t need to listen to it 32 times.” Did Linklater cast him in Dazed and Confused because he was a top stoner then? “Nononononono, I was never a top stoner. I was a guy who would take a hit and go to the damn library for three hours.”
Professionally, the crunch came when he turned his back on playing nice guys in romcoms despite earning an estimated $10m-$15m a film. His latest movie, The Lost Bus, is a survival drama about a struggling driver who has to navigate a bus carrying children and their teacher to safety through Butte County’s hellish inferno in 2018 (the deadliest wildfire in California history). In short, it is about a flawed nice guy learning to become a good man.
As so often, with his immersive process, the part required extensive research. This time he had to learn to drive a bus. Or more specifically, to drive a bus through fire and alongside cliff edges. Even today, he has prepared for the interview by reading up on me. (At one point, he compares his mother to mine, whom I have written about.) I ask if he always does this. “I’d rather if I can. I like to have a little insight.” He says it makes talking to journalists less an interrogation and more an authentic conversation.
McConaughey’s transformation from himbo to character actor was about challenging himself. He was hugely successful, but his reputation had taken a dip. He was now regarded as a Hollywood hack who never pushed himself. The challenge was not so much as an actor (he has always insisted that romcoms demanded as much skill as the more critically lauded films) but as a man. Was he prepared to snub the safe option and risk everything when he had a fabulously lucrative career (he was worth an estimated $160m in 2024)? After his final romcom, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, in 2009, he turned down every part he was offered for the best part of two years. Eventually, in 2011, the roles he was looking for came his way, starting with psychological thriller Killer Joe. And that led to the McConaissance, with McConaughey now feted for the courage of his choices.
When he quit romcoms, he had just become a father and was loving life, but his work left him unsatisfied. “I was good at something I wasn’t loving. I was never looking in the mirror going: ‘My life’s more vital than my work, oh I wish my work was as vital as my life.’ I remember going: ‘Well good luck, because if it’s got to be one way or the other, good on you that you feel your life’s more vital than your work and that it’s not the other way around.’ But I was like, ‘I want to go for it, I want to see if my work can be an experience for me that is so vital and alive that it challenges the vitality I’m having in my own life.’”
He says that he and Camila took the decision as a team and were determined to stick with it, but others thought he’d lost the plot. “My brothers were like: ‘Little brother, what is your major mal-fucking-function? What are you thinking?’ And I was like: ‘No, this is clear to me and Camila, we’re going to do this. We’re not going to pull parachute. We’re gonna ride this.’ And 20 months later, the levee broke and the offers came in that I wanted.”
Life, he says, continues to surprise him. Even today, he’s discovering things that shift perspectives on the past and help explain the present. As a young boy, he says his parents instilled him with such self-belief. His mother hung a framed photo of him as a gorgeous seven-year-old in a cowboy hat holding his Little Mr Texas trophy on the kitchen wall. “Every morning Mom was like: ‘Look at you, Little Mr Texas!’” It gave him confidence. A few years ago, he zoomed in on the photograph to read the engraving. He discovered it said “Little Mr Texas Runner-Up 1977”. When he asked his mother about it, she told him the technical winner was a wealthy boy who had cheated by wearing a fancy suit, so McConaughey was the true winner. The difference between believing you’re a winner or a runner-up can transform a life, he says. “Hell man, would I be sitting here right now if I’d thought I was just the runner-up?”
• Poems & Prayers is published by Headline; to support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. The Lost Bus is in cinemas now and on Apple TV+ from 3 October.
