Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - Matthew McConaughey

Episode Date: November 1, 2020

Matthew McConaughey is known for his free-spirited, easy-going philosophy on life, as embodied in his famous catchphrase “Alright, Alright, Alright.” The actor first uttered those words in the movie Dazed and Confused and they have followed him through a long career in Hollywood, from romantic comedies to TV series to an Academy Award for Dallas Buyers Club. In this week’s “Sunday Sitdown,” Willie Geist gets together with McConaughey over Zoom to talk about that journey, and what it was like to reflect on it in his new book “Greenlights.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks, as always, for clicking and listening along. Got a truly great one for you, not that they're not all great, but a truly great one this week with Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey. Who does not love McConaughey? We first fell in love with a guy back in 1993 when he played Wooderson in the movie Dazed and Confused. Remember he was the 20-something guy who's still hanging out with the high school kids in town, kind of a local legend who uttered the phrase, all right, all right, all right. Did you know those three words were the first line ever delivered by Matthew McConaug in a movie? It was his first acting job, and that was his first line.

From there, he went on three years later to star in a Time to Kill opposite Sandra Bullock. That's when he really became a movie star. Then he went through the 2000s as this bankable romantic comedy guy doing movies with Kate Hudson and J.Lo. a long list of romantic comedies. And then 2008 just goes dark. He was offered at one point, you'll hear him talk about it, $14.5 million to do another romantic comedy. And he said no. That's how serious he was about kind of turning things in a new direction in his career. So he goes away for 20 months, almost two years, comes back and just takes dramatic roles culminating in Dallas Byers Club, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor. Of course, he does. He doesn't. He does,

did True Detective, which is an amazing HBO series and so much more since then. And now he's out with this book called Green Lights. It is the story of his life. He went back and looked at the diaries he has kept for 35 or 36 years since he was 14 years old. He's 50 now. But last year, he took all those diaries, went to a cabin with no electricity in the middle of nowhere, and read through him and realized there are some good stories in here. I should put them in a book because I think a lot of people can relate to them. Most of us met Matthew McConaughey as a movie star, but there was a lot of life for him before he got into the business. Amazing, truly like eye-popping, some of them shocking stories in the book about his childhood and growing up in Southwest Texas,

Yvalde, Texas, including some scenes in his home of violence between his parents, violence toward him. And we have kind of a deep conversation about what he took away from that and what it means to So so much to talk about with Matthew McConaughey around his new book called Green Lights right now on the Sunday Sitdown podcast. Matthew, thanks for doing this, man. I appreciate it. You're welcome, Willie. Good to be here. Congratulations on the book.

I have spent the last two days in it. Can't put it down. And there's so many things to talk about in here. But I think mostly my big takeaway is people perceive you as this guy who kind of glides through life, dances between. the raindrops, movie star, but there, man, is so much more to it when you read in here. So why did you want to commit all this to a book? Because there are no punches pulled. It's all in here. Yeah. I do dance between the raindrops and have come out dry many times.

I also dance between the raindrops and come out soaking wet. That's life. That's all the fun of it. So, or the adventure of it at least, I, you know, I've been keeping diaries for 36 years, threatening to go revisit those diaries for the last 15, wondering if there may be words worth sharing in there. And then it wasn't until about two and a half three years ago that I got the courage to actually take them away and go see what was in there. When I did, I found seven sort of categories where all the diaries lined up. There were stories, people, places, prescribes. poems, prayers, and a whole lot of bumper stickers.

So I was like, okay, that's not a bad title right there. I looked through those and found a theme. The theme of green lights came out, meaning I found, you know, green lights are things that we like green lights. They say go. They affirm our way. They approve what we're doing. They say yes.

They give us freedom. We don't like the red and yellow lights. They're hardships, interventions. They make us slow down or stop and get in our flow. But I found that I had created a lot of green lights in my life by decisions I've made. Choices I made today created green lights for me in the future, gave me delayed gratification. I found that many green lights have been thrown down in my lap in the form of opportunities and found places where I took advantage of those opportunities, found places where I didn't take advantage of some of those opportunities.

But what could have been a green light, never became one. I also found that all the red and yellow lights in my life, the hardships or the times when I was lost and searching and trying to figure stuff out, getting very wet, dancing between the raindrops, that there were, they had green light assets invested in them. Sometimes I noticed that the green lights while I was in them, the hardship. Sometimes I didn't notice them until tomorrow, the next week, months. Some of them I noticed 10, 15 years down the road. Some of them I still have not reaped the green light benefits of my red and yellow lights

in my life. And my belief is that all of the red and yellow lights in all of our lives eventually turned green or at least reveal the green light assets in them through the lessons we learned through them. Was that daunting to go back through 35, 36 years of diaries? Were you scared about doing that? Worried about what you might find when you open those books? Yes, very much. I said, I feared embarrassment, shame, all of both of which I had when I went back and looked at them, but I also found this. Some of the things I thought I'd be only embarrassed about, I laughed my bought off that and thought they were hilarious. Some of the things that I thought I'd be shamed about,

I found that I had forgiven myself or forgave myself in the writing of the book with them. So it was daunting. The hardest part, though, like most of the things we do, call even working out, what's the hardest part about going to work out? Putting your damn shoes on and tying them and get nothing to work. The hardest part was going, okay, I'm doing this. Load up the car, take the treasure chest of diaries, we're going away, and we're not coming back until we have something. And after I did that, I let the diaries tell me what was in there and then found central themes and started to edit and put things together and try to create columns and thematics through the, through the book, all leading towards what's on the title Greenlight.

And that became a very fun. It was very hard. I averaged about 17-hour days. Wow. It took about 52 total days of writing in solitude. And then over the last year and a half editing what I had written. So what does that look like? You say packing up the car, going out into solitude with your diaries.

You went to the desert. What are we talking about here? You in the desert with a stack of diaries? Were you camping out there? What was that like? I had a friend who had a property in the middle of nowhere, and she had a small cabin that I went to. In the first 12 days were no electricity. Just me and my diaries to go.

And no cell service, no internet service. I didn't want anything intruding on my time. I wanted to, if all I had with me was my diaries, then that's all. all I can obsess on. And if I get bored or my mind starts wondering, just go back to those. That's what you're here for. Be fully singularly obsessed with those. So that was me in my life of 50 years together alone for the first 12 days. After that, the next place is I incorporated a generator. Then I moved to a place with a little bit of electricity. I brought a printer with me. I started transcribing some things onto laptop, things that weren't already.

and I would go in like 10 to 12 day little runs. I'd go away, then I'd come back, handle honey-doos at home and get rebalanced with the family, and then look for another free time, then head out. I mean, the hardest part about that was coming home and not staying on the writing, because I was, you know, I'd be, but my wife was very good about it. She was like, look, don't come back until you're fulfilled with what you've done on this run of writing. So I had a good support system behind me as well, doing it. I get why you wanted to read through those and kind of rediscover yourself.

And as you said, forgive yourself a little bit. But then there's a leap to making all that public in a book. So what was the moment where you said, boy, this is interesting and maybe cathartic for me. But I also think it's worth telling the world about. Yeah, great question. I mean, I understood early on Matthew McConae, as a celebrity, is going to sell a certain amount of books. People will buy them because of Matthew McCona.

There are also quite a few people that will not buy it because it's a celebrity book by Matthew McCona. So I remember writing to myself on day four, the words on these pages need to be worthy of sharing if they're signed by anonymous, but at the same time be a book that only I could have written. So that was my sort of measure of like excellence of what I needed to put down,

what the words needed to at least be from an objective point of view. I've then found this. I found that the more personal I got, the more relatable, the stories and the prescribes and whatever wisdom's in there became, the more I shared subjective experiences of mind, the more I saw and felt assured that other people would see, oh, I see myself in that. I've had a situation like that in my life. Oh, this is a way to go about it.

Oh, this is how I went about it. What did it give me later on? What did that decision give me later on in life? Did it buy me more ROI return on my life? investment ourselves in the future. And the stories are just playing out wild and adventurous anyway. So it's not a, it's not a, it's not a, it's not an ask, uh, sort of, uh, academic read. You know, it's more of a philosophical adventure story with some, some wisdom along the way.

And it's quite balanced as you opened up. I, I get away with a lot of things. I pull a lot of things off. I do come out dancing through the raindrops. absolutely dry in many circumstances. It's also equally balanced with times where I had grand plans to come out dry and came out soaking wet and did not pull things off. And looking at those as part of life's adventure instead of regretting them or feeling like,

oh, that's failure going, no, that you stayed in the game. Stay in the game, which is where we really would just keep living. It's just what else we're here to do. Let's just keep living. Just stay in the game. And I write in the book, you know, life's a verb. We don't have that ta-da moment where we arrive and go, now I've got it all figured out. Now I've done it.

As far as I can tell, that moment doesn't exist. When you see a celebrity written book like this, you might think, all right, I'm going to get a little taste of what he's like. I feel like I got the whole meal reading this. I mean, was there anything that you left out? Was there any line that you wouldn't cross and say, that belongs to me or that belongs to my mom or something that you didn't want to put out in the public? Sure. I mean, look, it's not a tell-all book. As you say, I don't, I don't tell tall tales on people. I was very conscious to go, even if I was the main character and a certain story, you know what, that's not really my story to tell. That would be trespassing on that other person's privacy. Their own privacy or maybe a privacy of a moment that we had. Nobody else's business. I thought it would be indecent and nothing constructive about sharing that. I bring up things early in the book with one-liners and a lot of it's been written about lately about, um, how I lost my virginity, for instance. I didn't choose to go into the details of that story or stories like that because I didn't

see anything constructive from. I didn't see a lesson that was learned. Those were moments in time that I was very clear when they were happening. This is wrong. This is not ideal. This is a red light. But I don't need to psychologically unpack this for the rest of my life. I don't have a constructive story of a way to.

to handle it better. It was clear to me at the time when those, when those things happened to me, that this is not how I planned it. This is not how I would wish, I wouldn't wish this moment on anybody. But to go into the details of it, I just felt like, and the reason I didn't go into details on some of those is I felt like it would prop it up to be voyured, would prop it up to be like, that, you know, oh, that's a great thing in this day and age to go, let's make that the headline and go into certain salacious details of that, which would take the eye off the ball, take the, the eye off the ball of what the whole book is. Is there something therapeutic about that?

Saying it out loud, even if you don't get into the details. As you say, it's painful. Now you've, now you've said it. There's threat. It's therapeutic and that it's free. Yeah. You know, I write in the book about not leaving crumbs or not, we all have certain things that are for ourselves and not for anyone else.

I've got, I've got them too, but to share those things. And in a non-sentimental way or in a way that I was, in a way that, as I say in the book, I never felt victimized by those. things. But to own up to them, share my scars and not look for someone's pity or not look for someone to come and like, go, we need to really break this down what this is done to you. Whatever, whatever they did to me, it's who I am. And I've lived through it. And like I said, I was very clear those things were not ideal and that they were wrong. Right. And someone asked me this the other day. I guess, you know, if they'd have happened to me younger in life where if I'd have

had any confusion about them being right or wrong, that could have been more traumatic. You know what I mean? But at the time, there was no confusion. I was like, that's wrong. Man, I was in the, I ended up in a bad spot. This is not how I saw it. I don't ever want to be here again. So the clarity of that allowed me to sort of compartmentalize that, put it back and go, I'm not going to go into details of that and share it because I don't see anything constructive about that. But it is, it's details like that, though, I think why the book is so fascinating is because you arrived to most of us as a movie star. We saw you in a time to kill or dazed and confused, and you were always Matthew McConaughey. But now here are the 23 or 25 years that preceded that, including the first story in the book.

Once you've introduced the concept and explain what green lights are, that incredible, breathtaking scene with your parents, fighting in the kitchen with blood and ketchup on the floor and everything that happens after that. And you talk about it, you say the love was really. It was bloody sometimes, but never in question. When you're looking at something like that as a kid, the scene in that kitchen, do you know that's wrong? Or did this come later, this epiphany later, that that was actually, you were watching love in some form? Well, I was scared at the moment.

But even then, and immediately after that, I didn't ever question the love that mom and dad had or the love that they gave us. Never questioned. And I think it's why I tell when I've always in my life, when people go, tell us about, you seem like you really love your family and your mom and dad and how you're raised. And I tell, yeah, and when I tell the stories, I tell these stories that are bloody and ugly, sometimes violent. And I think the reason I tell them is that those were times where the love that we had, that was never in question, was most challenged, but never had a chance of being be.

So the love that was around us never had a chance of being punctured. We just, we had a lot of this. Look, I love you. I just don't like you right now. Those, I tell the moments of great dislike. Moments of, look, my mom and dad were divorced twice, married three times. The two divorces, if it would have been opposite, married twice, divorced three times, well, the love would not have won. But they battled it out and the love always won. That scene you're talking about, which was bloody and violent, ended up with him making love on the floor. The love won. Again, um, that was just never. never in question. It was a scary, scary moment. And I did remove myself from it. And it was also a moment that, look, my parents did never go objectively later on, hey, we want to talk to you about that night. No. I mean, we were already on to the next month. They had made up. We had made up. Life's a rodeo. That's how they communicated. I don't choose to communicate like that. But I didn't also judge it. I didn't, I really didn't judge it. It was wild. It was passionate. It was scary, but it was the way they loved each other.

But you can see why some people are going to read this. Probably most people read this and say, wait a minute, that's abuse. That's what I'm looking at. And the way your father treated you sometimes is abuse. Did you not see it that way? Well, is it really fair for someone else to say that if the person who is actually saying in very conscious of what happened says, no, it wasn't? It's a great question.

I don't, my gut is that it's not really fair. I'm not in denial of it. My mom and dad are not in denial of it. My mom was never in denial of it. She's the first one to this day at 88 years old in the other room to go, oh, yeah, I needed that. I pushed those fights. I'm the one that started those fights. I needed that to communicate.

So I can't, I'm not going to judge her. I don't choose to need that. I don't need that much resistance in a relationship to feel passionate about it. So I don't know that it's really fair for someone. to tell someone else, oh, you've been victimized and you were abused. That person goes, no, no, I wasn't. I didn't know how I took it.

You can't take that. You can't steal someone's understanding, true understanding. Not in denial, but true understanding of a situation. Every time I got in trouble, if someone goes, oh, I don't agree with that today, that's fine. I don't raise my children the same way my parents raised me. I don't have the same forms of discipline as they did. but I'm not dare, I don't dare judge how my parents did it.

Because every single time I got in trouble or got the belt or whatever, I earned it. I knew what I did wrong. It was clear the values that my parents were instilling in me. I got in trouble for not answering to my name, for saying I can't instead of I'm having trouble, for saying I hate and for lying. Now, what did I learn from that? Answer to your name, love don't hate. say you're having trouble instead of saying you can't do something,

and don't lie. Pretty damn four great values I learned out of that, and I was never injured from any of those things. No one in our family was ever injured from those times of discipline. So that's another reason why their love stories to me. Has your perspective on that changed over the years? I mean, you say it's certainly not the way you handle your children or your relationship or your marriage.

Do you see it differently today maybe than you did as a child? I think myself like most of society is trying to turn a page and evolve in our ways that we teach lessons to our children, evolve and what consequences are. Because our consequences is good and bad for everything we do, and children, I believe, need consequences. And I understand the value of even fear. There's a lot of things I didn't do as a kid that I shouldn't have done for fear of the consequences. And that was helpful. That was useful. I choose in our family to have much more dialogue than my parents choose or their parents choose. And remember, this is a whole other generation that my parents came into.

And they were raised in a whole different way. That would have probably said the way their parents would have probably thought that they were too light on their kids. Us. So it's a different way. You know, we have more dialogue now. We couldn't have much. Parents, it's, my parents were a lot of, like a lot of parents at that time. Why? Because I said so.

Yep. We, we, my, my, my wife and I do a little more explaining, okay, let's debate this out. We talk about it a little bit more. And even today, my mom goes, geez, y'all talk about it too much. We're choosing to do that. We're trying to work it out. And that's the way we're trying, we're choosing to do it. Like, I think a lot of people are.

So we're, there's so much in here. We don't have time to cover it all, unfortunately. But skipping ahead to the acting. career and where that even comes from. So we've painted a picture of this household that you've come out of. Where does the actor Matthew McConaughey come from? When was he born? And I guess, I mean, you know, looking back, I could say if I'm going to deconstruct this and go, he was born November the 4th, 1969, the day I was born. But I didn't know it. Now, mind you, we grew up. And now when I look back, it's always a science when you look back, right? Going forward is always a mystery.

But when you look back, you can connect the dots and go, oh, you did have that in you. I look back and then go, we were always telling stories in our family. The dinner table full of storytelling. Everybody told a story. And you better tell a damn good one or you will get interrupted and someone to take over. So you want to get a word in edgewise, you better have a good story and you better tell it well. It was a fierce competition of that around the table. So I grew up hearing great storytellers.

Then I became a good storyteller. Now, literally to say, oh, when did I want to act? it wasn't really until after I got my first job days confused, literally. But even now, when you read the book, I look back in my diaries. I wanted to act before that. I couldn't admit it to myself out loud or tell my dad or my friends or anything. I could say I wanted to go to film school and be a storyteller, but I could admit I wanted to be an actor.

I couldn't even dream about it. It was not in the vernacular of my dreams. It seemed so far out there, so avant-garde, so other than, so impractical. but I did want to. And like many things in the book that I say, I forgot like the 10 goals at the end of the book or I didn't notice that I wanted to be an actor. Well, obviously I did.

You know, when I look back, I go, you may not have consciously acknowledged that, but really you did. And I found out a lot of that and going back through these diaries of my last 50 years. And you never could have imagined, speaking of days and confutes, when you improv the line,

that you probably would have it yelling at you on the street three, four times a day when you famously said, all right, all right, all right. Was that true? Three words I ever said on film. Yeah. And it's true. You just came up with that on your own. Yeah, there was not a word written for that entire scene.

I was not even supposed to work that night. I was on set to do a hair and makeup and wardrobe test. And the director invited me into a scene to say, hey, do you think your character, Wooderson would be interested in, you know, the red-headed intellectual. And I'm like, yeah, Wooderson likes AlgonnaGarles. He's like, well, you know, Marissa Visi's playing the role of Cynthia, the red-headed intellectual over here at the top-notch drive-in. I think maybe you'd be in your car, maybe pull up and try and pick her up.

I'm like, sure, next thing I know I'm in the car. And I'm about to shoot my first scene of my career at that time, thinking it was probably a one-off two-day hobby that I had in the summer of 92. And I started to go through my head, who's my man, who's Wooderson? What is Wooderson about? And I said, Wooderson's about his car. I said, well, I'm in my 1970 Cheveld. There's one.

I said, Wooderson's about getting high. I said, well, Slater's riding shotgun. He's always got a doobie rolled up. I said, Wooderson's about rock and roll. I said, I got Ted Nudget Stranglehold in the eight track. Here's three. And then I heard action. And I looked up over there at Marissa Hervisi,

Cynthia, the red-headed intellectual. And I said to myself, Watterson's about picking up chicks. I got three out of four. All right, all right, all right. That's incredible. And you never could have known what that was going to become. How often, honestly, do you hear that from people every day? All the time.

All the time. I mean, I hear it. I get pictures. People have it tattooed in very sensational places on their body. It on T-shirts, sit-on hats. It precedes me and it follows me. And, you know, I get asked all the time to get tired of it. And my answer is absolutely not because of those reasons.

It's the first three words I said ever on. film. And I didn't know if that was going to, like I said, be a couple of day job in the summer 1992 and I would never do it again. But 28 years later, it's turned out to be a career. Yeah. So it's a callback for me when I hear it. Like, yep, that's exactly how, precisely how I got started. That's really cool. It's like a monument at the beginning of your career. And so, you know, I think it's fair to say that there are some other films in between, but time to kill was the moment that you became, forgive the term, a movie star, you know? Sure.

So what was that like for you personally because you do write about it in the book where you go from literally one day, nobody recognized you on the street to the next day you're walking around. I think it's Santa Monica and everyone in the street knows you. Yeah. Well, over the weekend that a time to go came out, the opening weekend, my life changed over those two days. It opened on a Friday night. By Monday morning, the world was a different place. The world was a mirror. People come up.

Oh, I'm sorry about Ms. Hudd. Wait a minute. What's your name? Had you know I had a dog. Had you know her name was Ms. Hud and had you know she had cancer. You just skipped four things and leaps right into the, whoa, it was a bit shocking. Everyone had a biography of me, which happens to any person who gets famous. Somebody has an innate perception somehow of that person before they come up and they lean right into the story.

They come right into the cliff notes, you know, without the introduction. I noticed that I was not meeting strangers anymore. I noticed that for me personally, my soul needed some, missed its anonymity. Here all of a sudden, where last Friday before Time to Kill came out, came out, there were 100 scripts I would have done, but I couldn't do any of them. And now two days later, Monday, they're offering me all 100 of those scripts. And I'm going, what? Two days ago, I would have done any of those.

And now you're telling me I can do all of those. I need some discernment. I need to go figure out what matters here and what matters to me. So I put on a backpack and got out of Dodge and went to places where people did not know my name, where I was stuck with no one but me and my internal dialogue to try and get my soul and feed on the ground and understand, get my head and my heart communicating clearly again to say, what is it I want? What do I want to do? What is it I don't want?

I write about this a lot in the book. You know, it's very hard to know what we want and who we are, and that's okay. By process of elimination, getting rid of the things you don't want and who you are not, you will give you a better chance to end up being who you are and getting what you want. So that was the beginning of that process after I became famous and then went on from there. That's been every day since then for you. Does that feel like a lifetime ago when people did not know you on the street?

It doesn't feel like a different guy. I kind of, I'm kind of at ease with it now. I still, I'm able to now move and I'm much more equipped now to meet someone and already understand instinctually that out. They've already got to buy on you. But here, I know how to get down underneath that with them so we can have a real conversation. They can be completely honest with me as the guy they just met Matthew, not the actor, but

the man, Matthew McCona. So I've learned the tools for how to get under that in a graceful way, hopefully. And sometimes it takes longer with certain people. Sometimes it can take, you know, I don't have the effort where I write about it in the book, be less impressed, more involved. Sometimes people be so impressed with my fame or something, they're not involved in the conversation with them. They're holding a reverence for my place in society as someone famous that they're not really being themselves or behaving themselves. I've learned tools to get them to go, okay, got that now.

Hey, come here. Give you a hug. and ask a certain question about the day. Do you have children, you know, or something like that? And all of a sudden, then it baselines and I can have an involved conversation, an honest conversation with somebody. But I've learned how to do that over the years. Hey, guys, thanks for listening to the Sunday Sit Down podcast.

Stick around to hear more from Matthew McConaughey right after the break. Welcome back to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Now more of my conversation with Matthew McConaughey. There's some great scenes in the book when you're on. this run of romantic comedies. And I think it's the first one, the big one, the wedding planner, where they write you a big check and you go, wow, okay, I'm going to the Chateau Marmont.

I'm going to get my own key to the kitchen so I can cook steaks at three o'clock in the morning. Did you enjoy living that big life during that run when really, boy, it was one movie after another that were hits and everybody knew you and your co-stars were also big stars as well. Did you like that run up until a point? Because in the book, you say,

I knew it sort of had to end somewhere. I did, I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I gave myself licensed to enjoy it. I went ahead and said, okay, let's, let's see how much freedom you can give yourself. And go ahead. Let's just, let's just lean into your life that you, that you've got, McConaughey, and the access and influence and fame. So let's lean into it. Just let's let's go that.

Let's play that character for a while. And I did and I quite enjoyed it, but I always knew, even going into it, that it was going to be a stop, not a stay. I mean, I knew I didn't know how long, but I was like, no, don't go ahead. Don't, don't, don't, you know, pull out of this too early. Lean into it. Enjoy it. And you'll know when it's time to get out.

And that time did come where I needed more resistance. I needed more. I was, I had enough Saturdays in a row, you know, in my life and on screen. And I needed some Monday morning accountability, responsibility. And I needed some. ascension. I needed to start building. It needs resistance to create a new structure in my life. And then I think around 2008 or so, you sort of put on the brakes on things for almost two years. 20 months. Yeah, 20 months. And you say, I'm going to recalibrate. What were you doing in those 20 months?

And how did you know which direction to head after that? Well, I knew where I wanted to go and what roles I wanted to do, but those roles were not coming my way. So they were not an option. So because I couldn't do what I wanted to do, I stopped doing what I was doing. Stop the romantic comedy, stop the action adventures, moved out of the chateau, etc. I had met my now-wife, Camilla, at that time, and was falling in love with her, and we had created our first child. So those were two really great anchors to have for me in my life when I chose to take a sabbatical from working. I knew I would battle bouts of insignificance, which I did, I knew I had battle bouts of doubt.

What are you doing? I mean, you're not working right now, and you just got offered Buku's a million to bucks to go do that rom-com, and you love doing those, and they're easy. Why would just, if you get work, you go to work. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, hang in there, hang in there. I also, we had a family crisis that I had to tend to. outside of my immediate family that I had to tend to, which gave me real purpose.

And that's the hard part about being in limbo anywhere. It's the hard part about being in the limbo we're all in right now with COVID. What's our purpose? I don't have any identity with that purpose. What do I do? So I didn't really feel like I had purpose, but I did. And any time I didn't feel like I had purpose, I looked at my child, I looked at my wife, and I looked at my family that I was tending to.

So I did find purpose in those things. But I did. I entertained Maybe they never call back. Maybe Hollywood never calls back. Maybe this is it. Maybe I'm going to go be a high school football coach. Maybe I'm going to go be a teacher.

Maybe I'm being an orchestral conductor. I don't know. I entertain those things. But after 20 months of nothing, no rom-coms, no C&E shirtless on the beach, where's McConaughey? He's forgotten. Well, guess what?

Now he just became a new good idea for a role like a Lincoln lawyer, Killer Joe, Paperboy, Magic Mike, Mud, True Detective, Gospel. So I unbranded in those two years. I was gone. I was anonymous. Where is he? We don't see him every day like we were seeing him every day. We don't see him in the theater like we were seeing him. He's kind of gone, persona non grata.

And that's when I became a new good idea for the types of roles that I was really wanting and then just ferociously grabbed a hold of and ran with. Like you say, though, even for you, as successful as you are, there must have been some trepidation about that because Hollywood is so much about relevance and being hot. Yeah, yes. So all of a sudden, if you're gone for 20 months, we go, oh, maybe he's out of the game, maybe he's checked out.

But it turned out to be a great calculation. It worked out, and I had a hunch always, and I had made the commitment. I was really not going to come back. And I tell the story about even getting that $14.5 million offer. I was never going to do that. Really? No, I was never going to do it. I mean, look, like I said, I reread it because, geez, what for that amount of money?

And I write in the book, it was a better script, even though the same words were written at a much lower offer. It was a better script at that high number 145. I mean, I'm like, that's how puritanical. I let you know, I wasn't that puritanical. I was like, I think I can find an ain't this now. Everybody's got a number. Yeah. This thing's, woo-hoo.

And it was a better script, but I said, no. And actually that, I think, indirectly sent a signal in some ways to Hollywood. Oh, McConae's not bluffing at all. Yeah. And then again, I was sort of forgotten for the 14 months after that. There nothing came in. But I had, you know, I had saved my money. well. I knew I was checking in, you know, and if nothing, no other work came in, I would have

found another job to pay the rent. Yeah, but I stuck to it. I knew in my gut that there was something that down the line was going to come back to feed my soul. If I stuck with this sabbatical, if I stuck with this penance that I'd self-imposed penance that I'd put myself on. And then within the space of a year in 2013, 14, you get True Detective in Dallas Buyers Club, which turns out. out arguably to be the two best roles in your career. Of course, you won the Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. That had to be incredibly gratifying after 20 months of not being sure how this was going to turn out exactly to have it turn out that well. Yeah, it was. I mean, it was affirmation that me as an artist, as an actor, what I was putting out there, what I was intending to do was actually translating.

my art was translating. What was the most deeply personal, the more personal I got with the roles, which I was at that time in two pictures like that, True Detective and Dall Spires and others, the more personal I got, the more the world related to what I was giving out. It's something I've learned in the writing of this book.

The more personal I got in the book, as I spoke about earlier, the more relatable it became to more people. It was the fact that my art was translating. And the fact that my peers, who have great respect for, said, we deem your work in this film the most excellent of the year. That felt wonderful. And it let me know that I was communicating the right way, that my art was communicating, that myself was communicating and on a very large scale. And on a scale that people are going like, no, that's fine craftsmanship as well.

Yeah. And also, I have to imagine, for someone like you who's so famous, who gets, people get swallowed up by celebrity, culture and you do have your shirt off and paparazzi shots and Us Weekly's after you and you're doing the romantic comedies for you said, no, wait a minute, let's not forget. I'm an actor and I'm about to show you. That was sort of a contrast from some of that celebrity stuff. That wasn't really you, but that was projected onto you. Well, but those other things were me too. And I always said that. Rom-coms. I loved them. No, I just mean being on Us Weekly. You didn't ask for all that stuff, all the celebrity. Well, but I understood that comes, I mean,

I'm aware enough that that comes with the world. You know, but as far as like people try to go, you know, oh, this is now and that was then. That wasn't really you as a shirtless guy, rom-com. Now you're showing you. It's the true self. That's a bunch of BS. That was me too and still is. And those rom-coms I was doing were paying the rent for the houses that I was living on the beach shirtless on.

Yes. Thank you. I've never, so the old, oh, well, that was all sluffing. And I never had that question with myself of like, oh, I'm not. I don't have the goods. I didn't have that question. I did, though, understand that, oh, I'm in a position where these romantic comedies I'm doing, they're doing very well and they're entertaining.

And I respect that entertainment. But they're done so well and solidified my perception of me so much as a rom-com lead in the shirtless county meets that I'm not getting anything else. Okay. I get this game. Yeah. What do I need to do here? Hmm.

Like I said, I can't do what I want to do. So I'm going to stop doing what I've been doing. And I'm going to double down on this bet and hopefully it works. And it did. The term reconnaissance, love it or hate it? Maconnescence. Yeah. Love it.

Love it. It's musical. It comes off the lips easy. It was a, you know, that period, that run I was on, needed a sort of a slogan, an album cover. It needed something that was fun to say and kind of that could encapsulate it and something that felt like a verb. I've taken too much of your time, but I just want to ask you in closing, you write a lot about the idea of legacy and eulogy and what are people going to say about you. And I think all of us reach a certain age where your mindset shifts to that, especially I think when you have kids, I have kids too. And you go, what are they going to say about me or what's my legacy to them?

So what do you think as you put all this, and it's all in there, into a book, what do you hope anyway that your legacy will be? What do you hope people say about you at the eulogy? He's the best father he could be. He was at home in the world and worked daily to be at home with himself wherever he was in it. That's well said. Matthew, thanks for the time. I really appreciate it, man.

I did too. Really appreciate it. My big thanks to Matthew for a great conversation. I think they're all great conversations with Matthew McConaughey. And just for being so open and honest and telling all these stories, some of them probably not easy to put out into public, but he's put him down in this book called Green Lights, and it is in stores right now. My thanks, as always, to all of you for tuning in again this week. If you want to hear more of my full-length conversations with guests like Matthew McConaughey every week, be sure you click subscribe so you never miss you.

an episode. And of course, don't forget to tune in to Sunday today every weekend on NBC. I'm Willie Geist. We'll see you right back here next week on the Sunday Sit Down podcast.