The Mythmaking of Matthew McConaughey – The Cut

Photo: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images for Wild Turkey

Did you know that Matthew McConaughey made up the McConaissance? Indeed, he coined, and created the term, and fed it to an MTV reporter at a 2013 Sundance interview for Mud. It was a deliberate part of his rebrand from rom-com McConaughey the leading man in films like The Wedding Planner and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which brought him fame and fortune in the aughts to a serious dramatic actor. But he needed a campaign slogan, an anthem, a bumper sticker to brand the pivot, and he knew it couldnt come from him. So when the interviewer congratulated him for his recent work on Killer Joe and Magic Mike, he said: Thank you, yeah, Im on a great ride, I actually did an interview the other day and the journalist called it a McConaissance. Brilliant the McConaissance! The reporter gushed, That may stick.

The story, which hes never shared until now, is literally a footnote in Greenlights, his memoir, out this week. Reading it, you come across many of these anecdotes, which smell just slightly of bullshit but not enough to distract from the charm of the storyteller behind them. In fact, thats a good way to describe Greenlights, a book that will be sold as a celebrity memoir, but whose tales are so tall it reads more like a book of folk tales for grown-ups.

Consider the heros wet-dream adventures. The first was in 96, when he had a vivid, ejaculatory nightmare in which he was floating down the Amazon River, his body wrapped in various dangerous reptiles. He followed the dream to Peru and floated naked down the Amazon, where he caught the wave of a mermaids tale as she headed downriver. He waved back. When the same wet dream came years later, he spied African tribesmen on the banks, and followed the vision to Mali. There, he took on a local giant in a wrestling match as the rest of the village cheered them on. He claims, at various points, to have done peyote in a cage with a mountain lion, watched his father resurrect a drowned bird with mouth-to-mouth, and built a 13-story treehouse out of stolen wood. (He no longer has prophetic wet dreams, but the mountain lion, he says, ended up in his lap, purring while he scratched it under the chin. It was not a baby.)

Greenlights seems a natural title for a book by a man whos spent much of his life on the road. Behind the steering wheel has always been my favorite seat, and driving the highways of America has always been my ideal office, he writes. And indeed, McConaughey spent years taking meetings in his car, which he used to drag around the 28-foot airstream in which he lived after becoming famous. The book is scattered with poems and journal entries from the last 36 years of the actors life, many of them musings on American life, God, and class. Theyre collected under his own philosophical framework, something he calls catching Greenlights. He uses traffic lights as a sort of extended metaphor for living a well-examined life: What good can we find when were forced to stop? Whats the advantage of slowing down? How can we get better at catching green lights, and otherwise navigating the autobahn of life?

Now, at 50, McConaughey is sharing that philosophy on a virtual book tour (he is so far enjoying the Zoomies, as he calls them). Before starting ours, he gets up to grab a cup of tea its one of two silent stretches in the conversation and he fills it with whistling; in the other, he sings a nonsense ditty, doo-doo, da-doo, doo-doo, da-doo. Today, hes wearing glasses with transparent frames that obscure his eyes a little, but theyre picked up by the light-blue button-up hes wearing. The stubble along his jaw, which he rubs when hes searching for words, is salt-and-pepper, but his hair, which is wet, longish, and tucked behind his ears, is dark. As his author blurb notes, hes grown more of it at age fifty than he had at thirty-five, and I recall a story from Greenlights in which he shaved his head to combat hair loss and get in character for a role. When People published a photo of his rashy, chalk-white, freshly shaved nugget, he almost lost the movie. But he oiled and tanned the nugget for a week, and showed up to an industry party in a Gucci suit, looking, I presume, like this. He kept the job.

When he dimples, I recognize the rom-com-era McConaughey, the one I saw most growing up, but otherwise his air is distinctly professorial, a demeanor underscored by how frequently he falls into philosophizing. This is helpful, though, when I admit how nervous I am: You just did the best thing to this day I do the same on set. Its something I learned when I did the film A Time to Kill. There was a great defense attorney, last name Spence, and before every final summation, hed get so nervous, and couldnt quell it. Youve gotta learn to sit there right before and go: Sheesh! Im nervous! he hollers this, leaning back in his chair and pretending to wipe sweaty palms on his shirt. It kind of pops the bubble and all of a sudden, you relax.

Right now, hes at home in Austin with his three kids, wife, and 88-year-old mother. Theyve been doing puzzles, and every night the family goes outside to look for shooting stars. Its a way, McConaughey says, to replace the catharsis of church, where he usually likes to have a good cry. You look up in the sky and you go, Oh, I dont really matter. And in the I dont matter is when you realize everything matters.

Hes been relatively pretty good in quarantine. He likes to be alone, he says, sometimes too much, and recently spent several solitary months in the desert to write Greenlights, so the transition to lockdown was smooth. Hes spent more time counseling others, he explains, about how to make the best of the situation: What assets can we find? How do we get to know ourselves better? And when we come out of it, how can we find the courage to take what weve learned back into everyday life, when were out there dancing again? Its the language of catching Greenlights, but it works rather well in These Times.

Photo: Crown Publishing Group

Greenlights was written partially as a corrective McConaughey is so convincing in his roles, hes often accused of playing himself. Hes learned to take this as a compliment, explaining that all of his characters have a little bit of him in themhes simply their humble vessel, the guy who cranks up the hedonism here, or pulls down the piety there. But even as he describes Greenlights as an effort to publicly separate his identity from his work, he speaks about his real life in terms of a role: The character that Im playing at this location, which happens to be our home, is papa, (what his kids call him) who wrote the book Greenlights. And now Im going out and sharing it with people.

Maybe its deliberate, this description; letting his life bleed into his art, and vice versa, magnifies his larger-than-life-ness. Its a theme in the book, but more specifically his acting career. Take the circumstances of landing his first role as the endearing dirtbag Wooderson in Dazed and Confused. He met and charmed casting director Don Phillips at the Hyatt bar in Austin, which he couldnt afford but his friend, the bartender, gave him free drinks. Or, consider the regiment he tried to impose on himself while preparing to play dragon slayer Denton Van Zan in Reign of Fire, which involved the following: a double shot of tequila when he rose at sunrise, five barefoot miles run across the West Texas desert, and tackling sleeping bulls in a nearby ranch, naked. (The ranch was named locas pelotas, crazy balls, after he was caught doing this.) None of it is impossible, but reading it you cant help but wonder, what is fact, what is fiction, or if McConaughey really is just that unbelievable a word he happens to hate on a visceral and etymological level.

These anecdotes of how he prepared for roles or finagled his way into jobs through a combination of talent and charisma are the closest thing we get in Greenlights to gossip. He barely names any other stars, glossing over the 18-month hedonism tour he embarked on while living at the Chateau Marmont, a time that coincided with what he later describes as the bubbly mendacities of his rom-com emasculation.

Instead, theres a section in Greenlights that feels more revelatory than any dishy Hollywood anecdote. Its actually dropped right there in the intro, a two-page list that is markedly different from the rest of the book, and serves as a snapshot of McConaugheys life. These stories seem so far afield from his tall-tale-spinning, easygoing stoner persona that theyre startling to read, and they appear in a form that suggests he hasnt quite figured out how it all fits together either.

Some parts of the list he expands on later in the book, such as the tumult of being the child of twice divorced and thrice married parents. But there are also two disclosures which, like much of what he wrote about in the diaries that became Greenlights, he hasnt spoken about publicly, or even privately. The first: I was blackmailed into having sex for the first time when I was fifteen. I was certain I was going to hell for the premarital sex. Today, I am merely certain that I hope thats not the case. The second: I was molested by a man when I was eighteen while knocked unconscious in the back of a van.

Its all he says about either incident in the book, and beyond telling me its a fact, one Ive never shared, he doesnt really say why he included it in the introduction. He does, however, share the details of the events and how they made him feel, describing how sad he was he lost his virginity in such a bad situation: There wasnt anything pretty about it. There wasnt anything beautiful about it. I wasnt nervous for the right reasons. He notes that the molestation ended before it could have been something that may have really scarred me. He insists, without being asked, that neither experience affected him long term, that he never needed or pursued help afterward, and describes how he instead processed the events rearranged his thoughts so that he wasnt shaped by them. When I thank him for addressing it, noting that its rare for men in Hollywood to discuss experiences of assault, he sort of gives a deep breath and nods. Good. Yeah. Even just talking with you right then. It was enjoyable to talk about that in that way.

McConaughey considers himself a storyteller by occupation, and with Greenlights, seems to have fully made that turn. Hes written a couple of scripts. The one he wants to direct is about a young Black boy, the greatest fisherman the world never knew, named Curtis Mylove. His name is Curtis Mylove, because when his grandmother sees him, she says theres Curtis, my love here he holds his hands up, cupping an invisible face. He tellsthe story, using sound effects and phantom fish poles, and for a moment, Matthew McConaughey, the actor, is there. Anyways, I get excited when I talk about it, he says a little bashfully at the end, shaking his hands about his head like hes swatting gnats away. He calls the story magic realism a genre that peppers the mundane with the surreal, and is most effective when the audience cant quite tell what is fact and what is fantasy. Its a good metaphor for Greenlights, and perhaps his life.

Would he ever play himself? Pause. And then, loudly: The movie Im trying most to play myself in is this one were all in! L-I-F-E. Ideally directed by God, recorded by the hands of time. Thats the movie, you know what I mean?

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The Mythmaking of Matthew McConaughey - The Cut