Matthew McConaughey revealed on the “No Magic Pill” podcast (via People) that he once exiled himself from Hollywood and lived without electricity for 22 days in Peru when the pressures of early fame became too much for him to handle. He exclusively went by Mateo during this period as to further disassociate himself from his celebrity status.
“I needed to get my feet on the ground,” McConaughey said. “So I click out. Boom. Go to Peru. I needed to find it, to check the validation. I knew I had it, I just had to go prove it again. But I did question, now that I just got famous, I’ve got all this affiliation for this and that and the other. And I’m trying to decipher which part’s real, which part’s bullshit.”
The first 12 days of McConaughey’s pilgrimage were “wonky” but the back half proved enlightening for him, he explained: “I was now at the place long enough to go, ‘I could live this. This could be my existence.’ As soon as you go, ‘I could do this,’ then you’re like, ‘Well, I can return home.’”
“I needed to meet people who knew me as Mateo,” McConaughey added. “And at the end of 22 days, the tears in their eyes and the tears in my eyes and the hugs we had on the sadness and happiness of saying goodbye were all based off of the man they met named Mateo, who had nothing to do with the celebrity. It reaffirmed my own identity that, ‘Oh, I still got it. This is based on me.’”
McConaughey’s Peru exodus was in the early days of his stardom. He would exile himself from Hollywood again years later by moving his family to Texas after he grew frustrated with the town for limiting his acting career to rom-coms after becoming a household name in hits like “The Wedding Planner,” “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” and more.
The Oscar winner said in an Interview magazine discussion last year that “it was scary” to leave Hollywood while his career was so successful. He even thought that moving to Texas would mean he would need to find a new job.
“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,” the actor said, adding that his decision to then turn down a $14.5 million rom-com offer is what told Hollywood he was not messing around. “That was probably seen as the most rebellious move in Hollywood by me because it really sent the signal, ‘He ain’t fucking bluffing.’”
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