Actor Matthew McConaughey (Texas, 56 years old) has appeared in more than 70 movies and series, and has accumulated numerous awards, including an Oscar for Best Actor for the film Dallas Buyers Club (2013). With over 30 years of experience in the industry, when the Hollywood star life becomes too much, he usually takes disconnecting trips. According to what he revealed during an episode of the No Magic Pill podcast, hosted by Blake Mycoskie, he started these getaways with an expedition to Peru after rising to fame in the nineties following his starring role in Time to Kill (1996), alongside Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, and Kevin Spacey. “I needed to put my feet on the ground. So I disconnected. Bam! I went to Peru. I was questioning, now that I had become famous and had all these connections, I was trying to figure out what part was real and what part was pure lie,” McConaughey recalled about that decision.
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“It was crazy, out of nowhere everyone loved me when I had only said ‘I love you’ to four people in my life,” he remembers about his rise to fame. “I found that for me, as a celebrity, going to places where no one knows my name is something I needed,” the actor said. “I went for 22 days, as I usually do on these kinds of trips, and the first 12 were a bit strange. But the last 10 days were incredible. I had been in the place long enough to think: ‘This could be my life,’” he recalled on the podcast. “As soon as you think that, you realize ‘well, I can go back home now.’”
What he valued most from that expedition was the anonymity, according to the actor who will premiere the film The Rivals of Amziah King this summer. “People only knew me as Mateo and not for the movies I had made.” “And at the end of the 22 days, the tears in their eyes, the tears in mine, and the hugs we gave each other, between the sadness and joy of the farewell, it was all based on the man they met named Mateo, who had nothing to do with the celebrity, only with the experience we had in those 22 days.” That trip, he explains, was what helped him reconnect with his identity and feel like a person again.
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“That was incredible, because after you become famous, there are some things, like greetings, that are skipped,” and he exemplifies: “Obviously, ‘what’s your name? What do you do?’ Instead, they come and say: ‘I’m so sorry about Miss Hud’s cancer’ ―one of his dogs―. And you’re like: ‘How do you know I have a dog? How do you know its name? And how do you know it’s sick?’” the actor recounted.
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McConaughey wanted to repeat the experience last year, when he was writing his book Poems & Prayers, which collects reflections on his life and was published in September 2025. “I packed all my journals, water, and tequila [he has his own company called Pantalones Tequila] and went to a place without electricity in the middle of the desert, where I locked myself alone with myself and who I have been in my past,” he said on the podcast. “I learned from previous trips that there is an initiation period when we isolate ourselves, where the demons that torment us dance and have fun at our expense,” he continued. “Where guilt can be very heavy. Shame can be very heavy. And I know that, in my case, I don’t enjoy my own company for a while when I go on a trip. Around day 12, suddenly I have a catharsis or a revelation and I think: ‘Okay, what are we going to forgive? And what are we going to change?’”
This is not the first time Matthew McConaughey has spoken about the contradictions of fame. In fact, in the past he has said that he had to pause his career for two years because he felt stuck in romantic comedies, during which he even considered leaving cinema. After spending the first years of his career in California filming movies like Wedding Planner (2001), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), The Contract Bride (2006) or Fool’s Gold (2008), in 2014 he returned to Texas with his wife Camila Alva McConaughey and their three children, to be close to his mother and siblings, and raise his children in a quieter environment, away from paparazzi. Since then they have lived in the city of Austin, where the actor has become involved in the city’s political life which, as he has said in the past, makes him feel “connected” to his definition of home.
