What Made Matthew McConaughey Realize He Wanted to Act

You've got what I call whiskey philosopher wisdom. Like, if you and I were having a couple of drinks at the bar, I have a feeling you would say some cool shit that I would remember and I would take home and I'd go, hmm, I'd be like lying in bed going, I'm gonna remember that. That makes a lot of sense. Where'd you get that from? Ah, I think, I mean, I grew up and found this storytellers. I love lyrics, I love bumper stickers, I love slogans, I love to deconstruct a big conversation down to, what's a one-liner? What's the title of that song we just sang? What's the title of this hour or whatever you and I talk? What's the title of a relationship I have? And you get enough of those things, ooh, what's the album title? I think of things lyrically and I think that may be where it comes from, as I think in a musical way. Is this something you've acquired? Is this something you always had or you just sort of slowly developed it? I think, I'm guessing it was slowly developed. I mean, again, I come from a family of storytellers where we sat around the table and told stories and if you didn't tell your story good, somebody else at the table took it over. And you speak up, you better be telling a good story and not dragging on or losing your train of thought because somebody else will step in and roll over you. So when you wanted to get a word in, you better be a good storyteller. Is that how you got into acting? Like the ability to entertain because a storyteller is essentially an entertainer. Sure, well, I went to film school first because when I look back at the diaries, I really couldn't admit that I wanted to be in front of the camera as an actor, but that's what I really wanted to do. But I went to film school because I felt like being the storyteller behind the camera was something that my dad one could digest as a possible route forward for his son. And it was all that I could digest at the time. So when I made the leap to film school, I immediately would direct actors by performing myself in front of the camera. So I really liked the first person subjective performance. And then I got that job in that summer of 92 on Days of Confused, where I ended up three lines turned into three weeks work. I'm getting paid 320 bucks a day. People would tell me I'm good at it. I keep getting invited back to set. I'm like, is this fucking legal? Yes. So I went back, graduated, picked up, packed up my U-Haul and drove West Young Man two weeks out of graduating college. And I didn't have that story of roughing it when I first got out there. First two auditions I went on, I got the job. That's pretty fucking amazing. Yeah. When you say that you didn't want to admit that you wanted to be in front of the camera, what do you think was holding you back? I think it was the idea. Look, I was raised in a blue collar family where you get a job, you work your way up the ladder, company ladder. To be in the arts, to be in front of the camera, the actors sounded so vain, sounded so avant-garde, sounded so European, sounded so nothing stable about it. And so to bring that up to my dad, even bringing it up, like I said, it was not even in the vernacular of my dreams. I did not even dream about it. The only place that I admitted it was in my diaries. And I found those where I wrote to myself before I even consciously admitted that I did want to be an actor, all the way back since 1988. But I never admitted it until I started doing it. And it turned into about 1993 that I was like, okay, I think I can do this. I'm giving it a shot and I love this. It's totally understandable that it would fall into some form of self-sabotage if it came that easy. If all of a sudden you're on days and confused, all of a sudden you do your first two auditions, you get the gig, everything's rolling, you're young and handsome, whoo! Come on, dream nice. I mean, how did you self-correct? Tell you what I did. It really happened around 96 after I did a film with Time to Kill. I remember the Friday before Time to Kill opened. That's the movie that I was the lead in a big budget John Grisham movie. That was the one that made me famous. So the Friday before that movie opened, there's a hundred scripts I wanted to do. I would have done anything to do any of these scripts. 99, no you can't, one, yes you can. I'm walking down the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, 400 people in the Promenade, 396 minding their own business, four of them checking me out. Two girls that thought I was cute and a couple other people that maybe like my shoes. The Monday following that weekend, Time to Kill opens that night. The Monday following, all of a sudden, out of those hundred scripts, 99 yeses. You can do any of these Matthew, one no. All of a sudden that same Promenade walk I took, 400 people, now 396 were staring at me and four people weren't, one of them was blind. It inverted, the world became a mirror. I noticed, oh shit, I don't need any strangers anymore. People are coming up to me going like, I'm so sorry about Miss Hud and I'm going, wait a minute, number one, what's your name? I've never met you, how'd you know I had a dog whose name is Miss Hud and has cancer? You just skipped five filters of howdy, you know what I mean? And I remember feeling unbalanced about it. All of a sudden, I'm 23 at that time. I'm being told, I love you, I love you. And in my mind, I'm going, man, we don't throw that word around. I've said that to four people in my life. So I wanted to know what the heck was real, what really mattered. And I was looking for a place to go. I need to get out, I needed to go, those demarcations we talked about earlier, I needed to go break a long sweat. I needed to go out and let memory catch up and see what the hell was real, what was not. So I packed up my stuff. I went to a monastery for about a week. And then I got back and I went off, I had this certain dream, a repeating dream that came to me. And I went to Peru and flooded the Amazon for 22 days. And it was a forced solitude. Nobody there knew my name, they didn't speak English. I was forced to be with myself and my thoughts in my own company, which I was not enjoying. So after about 12 days of shaking the monkeys off my back, figuring out what the hell I was gonna forgive myself for and what I was gonna lay down the hammer and say enough's enough about. I came out of it, woke up one morning, light as a feather and shook hands with myself and said, we're gonna be all right, man. You're the one person I can't get rid of McConaughey, so we might as well get along and re-entered. And that recalibration helped a lot to disseminate through all the bullshit and all the excess of affluence that was coming at me at the time. And I found some discernment, I found some discrimination in my choices again and moved on from there. But I've had to do that. I've had to take off on my own many times to go recalibrate. That sounds like a story of a man running and the rocks fall right behind him. Like you just missed it. Like also 23 years old, you weren't a child star, but it was damn close. Like we all know what happens when your personality develops in the spotlight and you're famous, almost no one gets out alive. I mean, and I understand it. I wasn't ready to go out to Hollywood before I did. Hollywood's not a place to go find yourself. Hollywood's a place where you can be anything you want. It's infinite yeses. Well, in the infinite yeses, as you know, the infinite options can make a tyrant of any of us. Episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience are now free on Spotify. That's right, they're free from September 1st to December 1st. They're gonna be available everywhere, but after December 1st, they will only be available on Spotify, but they will be free. That includes the video. The video will also be there. It'll also be free. That's all we're asking. Just go download Spotify. Much love, bye bye. Me. Pfft.