Why Matthew McConaughey went into exile in Peru for 22 days

“I was trying to figure out what was real and what was bullshit…”

“I needed to go somewhere where no one knew my name..”

In the mid-1990s, just after having exploded in Hollywood thanks to the legal thriller The Right to Kill? (A Time to Kill), released in 1996 with Sandra Bullock in the lead, Matthew McConaughey abruptly fled the Hollywood machine.

Podcast guest No Magic Pillthe actor revealed that he went to live alone in Peru for 22 days, without electricity, as the pressure of his newfound fame became too much to handle.

“I needed to get my feet back on the ground.”he explains. “So I cut everything. Boom. Heading to Peru.”

During this trip, Matthew McConaughey even abandons his public identity to call himself only “Mateo”, in order to completely detach himself from his image as a rising star.

“I was trying to figure out what was real and what was bullshit“, he confides. “I had just become famous, everyone was projecting something onto me… and I wanted to find who I really was.”

The first twelve days were particularly difficult, almost unreal according to him. But the second half of the stay ended up acting as a revelation: “I got to a point where I said to myself: I could live like that. This could be my life. And as soon as you realize that, you can go home.” The actor explains above all that he needed to meet people who did not know the celebrity, but only the man behind the image:

“I needed to meet people who knew me like Mateo. At the end of the 22 days, the tears in their eyes and mine as we said goodbye had nothing to do with fame. They were linked to the man they met.”

An experience that would have allowed him to regain self-confidence: “It confirmed to me that I still had it. That it all really came from me.”

And this won’t be the only time Matthew McConaughey distances himself from Hollywood. Years later, tired of being locked into romantic comedies after the success of A Marriage Too Perfect (2001) or How to get dumped in 10 lessons (2003), the actor will leave Los Angeles with his family to return to live in Texas. A risky decision, which he recently described as “terrifying”. He even thought he would have to abandon cinema and completely change careers.

“I told myself that maybe I would teach high school, become a conductor or an animal guide”he reveals.

The real shock for Hollywood will come when it refuses a romantic comedy and a fee of 14.5 million dollars: ““It was probably seen as the most rebellious thing I’ve done in Hollywood.”explains Matthew McConaughey. “There, they understood that I was not bluffing.”