Matthewspins a personal yarn
In hismemoir Greenlights, thestar says he turned out all right despite obstacles
Would it surprise you to learn that more than 30years ago, before he’d even sauntered across the screen in ‘ Dazed and Confused’, Matthew McConaughey wrote a poem in which he vowed he’d someday become an author?
Thiswas in 1989, when he didn’t know all the twists and turns that awaited him — the acting awards he’d win, the wife and children he’d have, the bracing dramas and banal rom- coms he’d make. But hewas certain hewould live a life worth chronicling.
Nowthat poem, rendered in its creator’s arcane handwriting, appears at the start of his autobiography, Greenlights, which Crown will publish Tuesday.
The book offers a shotgun seat to all the l- i- v- i- n that McConaughey has accumulated, fromhis upbringing in a tumultuous Texas family to his ascent as the ruggedly serene star of Magic Mike, True Detective and Dallas Buyers Club.
McConaughey, who turns 51 on November4, enjoys spinning someof these personal yarns, not necessarily because they sound cool but because he believes they reveal certain teachable truths.
To that end, Greenlights is filled with homespun wisdom that McConaughey has wrung fromhis toils, travels and that time he got arrested while playing bongos in the nude. He has fortified his remembrances with the coinages and maxims he dutifully recorded in decades’ worth of personal journals and which continue to spill naturally fromhis mouth.
It is a book that is constantly evaluating itself and its reasons for being, much like its author. He acknowledges that he entered into the project both eagerly and warily. “I get what equity I bring as Matthew McConaughey, however you see me,” he said in a Zoom conversation lastmonth. He spoke froma den in his home in Austin, Texas, wearing his hair swept back and a flannel shirt thatwas only partly buttoned up. “If it’s a straight memoir”— he stressed the second syllable with an unexpected French flair—“as a publisher you could sell some books.”
What he hoped to produce, he said, was one where “thewords on the page are still worthy to share if theywere signed by anonymous but at the same time be a book that only McConaughey could’ve wrote.”
Like the bestubbled dude you have seen whooping it up at WWE matches and sermonising in luxury car commercials, McConaughey is alternately uninhibited and self- serious.
He is comfortable referring to himself in the third person and dismisses any suggestion that he has stumbled backward into his professional success.
As he told me, he knows there are people who think, “Gosh dang, McConaughey just eases right into everything— the guy doesn’t seemto have any bumps, doesn’t get hit crossing the road.” He said he wrote Greenlights partly as a corrective to this perception, to show how much effort it has taken to get where he is.
But McConaughey wants readers to
look beyond the boldface name on its cover and focus on its fundamental message. No one can escape hardship, he said, but he can share the lessons “that helped me navigate the hard stuff.”
Codifying his beliefs and putting them downon paper was one test. The next challenge comes as McConaughey releases Greenlights into aworld that feels increasingly unsettled and dismissive of values systems— one where, like millions of Americans, he and his family have spent the past several months “trying to outrun the ol’ Covid,” as he put it. “I’m still continuously testing and updating my philosophies, practically daily,” he said. “And I can do better at a lot of them.”
As McConaughey tells the story, his youth was dominated by his father, Jim, a former college and professional football player turned pipe salesman who was married three times to and twice divorced fromthe actor’s mother, Kay. Jim was tough on his sons, too, but, McConaughey, who is the youngest of three brothers, said, “I wouldn’t give back one ass- whupping I got for the values that are ingrained inme.”
Whenhe reflects on his parents, McConaughey said, “The love was real. The passion was real.”
McConaughey recounts howhe landed his breakthrough role as the likeable sleaze Wooderson in Dazed and Confused by tracking downthe film’s casting director, Don Phillips, in an Austin bar and charming his way into an audition. A fewy ears later, the not- yet- bankable actor mounted a successful campaign to persuade director Joel Schumacher to cast him in a leading role in his adaptation of A Time to Kill.
To McConaughey, stories like these illustrate howhe is not content to merely let life happen to him. “It’s always been obvious to methat I do not have a laissez- faire attitude,” he said. “It’s a state of being that Iwork at, continuously, daily, and I break a sweat to get it.”
In Greenlights, McConaughey tells the back stories of someof his best- knownroles, but he does not take a film- by- film inventory of his entire career. Nor does he share any particularly salacious details from his personal life when hewas still a single man, beyond a paragraph in which he writes: “I wore the leathers. I rode the Thunderbird. I took a lot of showers in the daylight hours, rarely alone. I partook.”
McConaughey toldme that while such scenes are generally staples of celebrity tell- alls, he felt that to include them “would be in bad taste and bad manners— that’s why bedrooms have doors on ‘ em.”
However, he does unhesitatingly share two different stories in which he awakens from dreams where he saw himself “floating downstream onmy back in the Amazon River” while surrounded by jungle life and “African tribes men lined up shoulder to shoulder on the ridge to the left of me.”
He interpreted these visions as subconscious exhortations to travel to Peru, where he immersed himself in the Amazon, and to Mali, where he sparred with a local wrestling champion.
Sections like these shed light on the transcendental side of the author, who is a practicing Methodist but also describes himself as “an optimistic mystic”.
That approach to existence has sent McConaughey hunting for what he calls “greenlights”— the traffic signals that mean g.
To conclude that life is all about luck, he said, is to surrender to fatalism: “Quit letting yourself off the hook, McConaughey. If that’s true, then run every red light. You’ve got your hands on the wheel. You’re making choices. They matter.”
“It’s always been obvious tome that I do not have a laissez- faire attitude. It’s a state of being that Iwork at, continuously.”
MATTHEWMCCONAUGHEY Actor