The actor on his life philosophies, securing roles, and his new memoir Greenlights

The actor on his life philosophies, securing roles, and his new memoir Greenlights
Would it surprise you to learn that more than 30 years ago, before hed even sauntered across the screen in Dazed and Confused, Matthew McConaughey wrote a poem in which he vowed hed someday become an author? As one of its lopsided verses declared:
I think Ill write a book.A word about my life.I wonder who would give a damnAbout the pleasures and the strife?
This was in 1989, when he didnt know all the twists and turns that awaited him the acting awards hed win, the wife and children hed have, the bracing dramas and banal rom-coms hed make. But he was certain he would live a life worth chronicling.
Now that poem, rendered in its creators arcane handwriting, appears at the start of his autobiography, Greenlights, which Crown published on Tuesday. The book offers a shotgun seat to all the l-i-v-i-n that McConaughey has accumulated, from his 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 November 4th, enjoys spinning some of these personal yarns, not necessarily because they sound cool but because he believes they reveal certain universal and teachable truths.
To that end, Greenlights is filled with homespun wisdom that McConaughey has wrung from his 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 from his 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, looking to use his celebrity for the opportunity to tell his story in his own idiosyncratic way.
No one can escape hardship,’ he said, but he can ‘share the lessons that helped me navigate the hard stuff’
I get what equity I bring as Matthew McConaughey, however you see me, he said in a Zoom conversation last month. He spoke from a den in his home in Austin, Texas, wearing his hair swept back and a flannel shirt that was only partly buttoned up as he peered into his webcam through a pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses.
If its 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 the words on the page are still worthy to share if they were signed by anonymous but at the same time be a book that only McConaughey couldve wrote.
Matthew McConaugheys new book Greenlights includes many of his homespun life philosophies. Photograph: Devin Oktar Yalkin/The New York Times
Like the bestubbled dude you have seen whooping it up at WWE matches and sermonizing 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 doesnt seem to have any bumps, doesnt 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 like I say, get relative with the inevitable sooner and in the best way possible for myself.
Codifying his beliefs and putting them down on paper was one test. The next challenge comes as McConaughey releases Greenlights into a world 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.
Im 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 from the actors mother, Kay. The books first chapter dramatises a scene from 1974 where McConaughey watched the couple fight ferociously his mother having broken his fathers nose with a telephone while he brandished a ketchup bottle before his parents had sex on the kitchen floor.