Actor Matthew McConaughey reflected on his two-year hiatus from Hollywood, during which he nearly dropped his acting career.
“I’ve usually zigged when I felt like Hollywood wanted me to zag. When I had my rom-com years, there was only so much bandwidth I could give to those, and those were some solid hits for me,” he explained. “But I wanted to try some other stuff. Of course I wasn’t getting it, so I had to leave Hollywood for two years.”
McConaughey shared how “scary” the departure was and recalled conversations with his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey, about pursuing a complete career change. Teaching high school classes, studying to be a conductor, and becoming a wildlife guide were all vocations he considered.
“Dude, it was scary,” he told Powell. “I had long talks with my wife about needing to find a new vocation. ‘I think I’m going to teach high school classes. I think I’m going to study to be a conductor. I think I’m going to go be a wildlife guide.’”
He continued, “I honestly thought, ‘I stepped out of Hollywood. I got out of my lane.’ The lane Hollywood said I should stay in, and Hollywood’s like, ‘Well, [expletive] you, dude. You should have stayed in your lane. Later.’”
The Academy Award winner likened that period to a “desert” but said he was determined to persevere.
“The days are long—the sense of insignificance,” he said. “But I made up my mind that that’s what I needed to do, so I wasn’t going to pull the parachute and quit the mission I was on. But it was scary, because I didn’t know if I was ever going to get out of the desert.”
Powell responded saying he avoids listening to the “ghost stories” of people who leave Hollywood never to return. He added that he believes in the “natural breathing pattern” within Hollywood and the need for a long-term perspective on a career instead of thinking short-term.
“At the end of the day, I do believe that there’s a natural breathing pattern to Hollywood where you give it all you got, you’re in everybody’s faces, and then you disappear for a hot minute and let them miss you, and then you come back.” the “Top Gun: Maverick” star said.
“You have to buy into the longer journey. Trust in the decades-long career rather than the short and intense one.”
McConaughey, born in Texas, correlated it to “Lean horse, long ride.” Recalling that achieving fame from his first “big success” for his starring role in “A Time to Kill” caused him to leave the country for weeks to regather his thoughts.
“I don’t know about you, but for me, going back to ‘A Time to Kill,’ after I first had a big success in a major studio picture and became famous, I remembered that the Thursday before that movie opened, there’s 100 scripts out there that I would’ve done, and 99 of them I could not book.” he said.
McConaughey’s Background
Matthew McConaughey achieved his first break for his role in the comedy film “Dazed and Confused” in 1993 before appearing in several romantic comedies during the early 2000s. In 2013, he starred in multiple films including “Wolf of Wall Street” and “Dallas Buyers Club,” the latter earning him an Oscar in 2014.Although he has spent plenty of time in Hollywood, the “Interstellar” star has firm roots in Texas. In 2014, he and his wife sold their California home to reside in the Lone Star state full-time.
“Once I felt like I was in Hollywood, I felt comfortable enough to go back home,” he told Powell. “You can really be an honest observer of humans in Texas. It’s tough to do that in Hollywood, because everyone’s a voyeur. Instead of going someplace to eat, a lot of Hollywood’s going to that place to see who’s coming to that place to eat.”
“He’s like, ‘Hollywood is the Matrix, man. You plug in and it’s all fake world,’” Powell said about McConaughey. “He’s like, ‘Then I go to Austin, and I unplug. It’s all real. Those are my friends, that’s my family, my actions matter there.’”
