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This man is on a journey of enlightenment, although you might not know it by looking at his schedule. Matthew McConaughey has three movies being released this year alone, a seat on the A-list of young leading men, and just about anything he might want or need. But recently, he jettisoned the extraneous to live out of a trailer with his possessions in a single backpack.
He calls it his Year of Three Summers.
“I’ve had three summers in a row,” says McConaughey. “I was in Malibu one summer, then I went to Australia for their summer, which is our winter, then I came back here in our summer. So it looks like I’m on the beach every day, and I was, because I’ve had a year of summer days.”
McConaughey went to Australia to film Fool’s Gold, in which he costars with Kate Hudson as a goodnatured, surf bum-turned-treasure hunter, obsessed with finding the legendary 18th-century Queen’s Dowry: 40 chests of exotic treasure that were lost at sea in 1715. His character sinks everything he has into finding the treasure, including his wife and his boat. While living in Malibu, McConaughey starred in and produced Surfer, Dude, in which he plays “a soulful surfer.” “It’s about brotherhood and being true to yourself,” he says.
Thus launched the journey of his lifetime, a return to what matters most.
HE IS CALLING FROM THE ROAD, driving “Cosmo,” his 1996 GMC van, heading alone to a photo shoot at Frank Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, California. This being Celebrated Living’s “Sporting Life” issue, I had called to ask him about fitness, and he was all too happy to talk about that. From all the photographs of a buff Mc- Conaughey running on the beach, you would think he has quite a grueling fitness regimen. But McConaughey doesn’t do anything as a regimen. Everything is organic, a path with diversions welcome.
“I’m not a fitness nut, actually,” he says. “It just shows up in the magazines all the time because I’m outside. Growing up, we had a rule in the family: If it was daylight, you had to be outside. You weren’t allowed much television, you weren’t allowed to stay inside in the daylight, so you had to get outside and go play or build something or go swim in the lake. I was pretty athletic in everything I played. Active, active was the thing. Then, you know, going on the job that I have, I have the ability to take care of myself.
“I’m always doing something different,” he continues. “Sort of the creed I go by is: Just break a sweat, somehow, every day. I don’t have to go to the gym an hour a day. Maybe, I’ll say, ‘Hey, for this two weeks I’m going to crank out 200 push-ups a day.’ I don’t care if I do 200 before 10 a.m., I don’t care if I do 200 after 6 p.m. I don’t care if I do 20 an hour, just through the day. I’m not going to go to the gym if I’m going out with my girl dancing, because I’m going to go dance and break a sweat. I don’t remember the last time I’ve been to a gym. I’d just rather pick a point and say, ‘Instead of driving over five minutes before, let’s leave forty-five minutes early and jog over.’”
What’s important in his workout, as well as in his life, is variety. In the last few years, he’s abandoned weight training altogether. “With my genetics, if I start lifting weights, I can get pretty bulky,” he says. “I’m working right now with an Ultimate Fighting Trainer; he’s a Jujitsu guy. I just started working with him a month ago because I was actually kind of tired of jogging. I was getting bored with riding that bike; I wanted something with a little more contact. This incorporates boxing, and I wanted to work on my wrestling skills. Put asterisks by this — I am not looking to go into the U.F.C. [Ultimate Fighting Championship].”
McConaughey’s Year of Three Summers, and playing two beach bums in a row, naturally led him into surfing. “That’s a workout, especially when you are not very good at it,” he says. “You’ve got to paddle your butt off.” He pauses, and you can hear the desert highway wind whipping through the van.
“One of my favorite things about my success is being able to pay for good health,” he says. “I have the ability to eat great. I have a housekeeper who comes by and takes care of me, wherever I am. We get great fruit, fresh every day. I’ve been eating organic for about a year now. I do eat meat. I’ve got to have my meat.”
That includes pulling off the road for a highway hamburger, especially his Texas favorite, Sonic Drive-In’s double-meat cheeseburger with jalapeños.
“But that’s another thing about my fitness regime. A purist I’m not. I believe that things like Sonic and sweets or whatever, the pleasure is good for you. So whatever you dig. I mean, I can’t eat a burger every day, but if I’m wanting to pull into an In-N-Out [the famed California burger franchise] out here off the I-10 on the way to Palm Springs, I’m going to do it, I’m not a purist. I love food too much. I love the taste of good food. I love good red wines too much to say, ‘Hey, I’m cutting that out.’ I would be bored. I love to eat, I love good smells, I love to cook. If I’m going to eat a big pizza tonight, I may chunk on an extra mile on the jog tomorrow.”
LAID BACK, LAISSEZ FAIRE, and his personal mantra, “Just keep livin.” The philosophy of Matthew McConaughey is a natural progression, one boot step after another, a life liberated from datebooks and calendars and to-do lists. The third and youngest son of a Texas schoolteacher and an oil pipe salesman, McConaughey was taught to “always see the rose in the vase rather than the dust on the table,” and never to lie, say “I can’t,” or disrespect women. He was a straight-A student and “study hound,” planning to become a defense attorney. He was so prepared for his sophomore exams at The University of Texas that he had time to kill before the hour of the tests. Being Mc- Conaughey, he took a detour that changed his life.
“Sort of the creed I go by is: Just break a sweat,
somehow, every day. I don’t have to go to the gym
an hour a day. Maybe, I’ll say, ‘Hey, for this two
weeks I’m going to crank out 200 push-ups a day.’ “
“I wasn’t sleeping well with the idea,” he says of law school. “I wanted to tell stories. I’d been writing short stories, keeping a diary, but I’d never even dreamed of going into the storytelling business.” On his way to take his sophomore-year exams, he stopped at the house of a friend. “I went in there two hours before my exam, opened up my books, started studying, and all the sudden I was like, ‘McConaughey, you’ve got to shut the books! You’ve got it!’ So I shut the book. That was a first for me.”
 Turns out, there was something greater awaiting him at his friend’s house that day.
“I look down and there’s this white paperback book and in red writing it says, The Greatest Salesman in the World. So I picked up the book and started reading from the beginning. I lost all track of time, went through the first scroll about changing habits for the better, and then had a feeling come over me that this book had found me in a special way. I found it, it found me.” The classic 1968 inspirational book about bringing out the best in yourself by Og Mandino enlightened McConaughey just as it has enlightened millions of readers around the world.
“I looked up, and it was five minutes before my exam …”
He did take his exams, but McConaughey was finished with law. “That book found me at the right time and gave me the courage to say, ‘I’m going to take this path that is a little less traveled, that I’m more excited about now and I’m not going to do what I always thought I was going to do.’ The day after I started that book, I went down and changed my course schedule, signed up for film school — after I called Mom and Dad, and, of course, they said, ‘Go for it.’ And here I am.”
THE REST IS, OF COURSE, fact that reads like fable. He met casting agent Don Phillips in an Austin bar, which led to a role in fellow Texan Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused in 1993 as the slacker Wooderson, who says the line that became McConaughey’s mantra: “The older you get, the more rules they are going to try and get you to follow. You just gotta keep on livin’, man. L-I-V-I-N.” Later came his breakout performance opposite Drew Barrymore in Boys on the Side in 1995, then snagging the lead role out of a hungry pack of potential candidates and presentday superstars as young lawyer Jake Brigance in John Grisham’s A Time to Kill, which led to his being proclaimed the new Paul Newman. Steven Spielberg cast him in Amistad; Robert Zemeckis starred him opposite Jodie Foster in Contact.
After more than 30 films, he was a bona fide star.
His first reaction to fame? “Man, let’s party!” he says on his website, MatthewMcConaughey.com. “And then it settles down and you go, ‘Okay, this is part of my life. And I can’t keep running around being really impressed with myself.’” He has since lent his name, money, and time to causes that include Katrina
“The older you get, the more rules they are going to try and get
you to follow. You just gotta keep on livin’, man. L-I-V-I-N.”
relief efforts, Oprah’s Angel Network, and establishing his own j.k. livin’ foundation, to help those in need.
He bought a ranch in West Texas — “That’s home; a family ranch, where me and my brother and my nephew raise Black Angus cattle and quarter horses.” In Los Angeles McConaughey purchased a great house befitting a movie star in the Hollywood Hills. He remodeled the house, designing everything himself. “It was Shangri-La,” he says. “I’d pick up things overseas, ship them back here, got custom things made for me in Africa and South America … and slowly put together a very eclectic but very sort of Mediterranean villa.”
But … “I wasn’t living with anyone,” he says. “So it was a little big. I had four bedrooms, and I only used one. I had a master bedroom upstairs — great bedroom, but the kitchen was downstairs. If I took my food upstairs to go have dinner and do some work up there in the bedroom, and I forgot the ketchup, I’d have to go all the way downstairs to get it, and I did not like that trip. I do not like stairs. I learned that about myself. Well, I ended up moving my bed downstairs into the den, and then my next move was I wanted to move the damn bed into the kitchen. I was like, ‘What are you telling yourself, McConaughey?’ I was basically making a trailer out of the house. I didn’t go upstairs for two months.”
He packed up his things, sold the house, and moved into the trailer he had parked in the driveway.
“Yeah, drove off in the trailer and went to the beach,” he says. “I moved the trailer from there out to this cool little RV park out in Malibu, right on the beach, and stayed there.”
Then, once he had jettisoned the house, he found other things in life that he didn’t really need, not in his new life of Endless Summer. “You can only have a few things when you are living in a trailer,” he says. “You know how you go through those spring cleanings? You look around and you go, ‘Okay, I’ve got 20 T-shirts, but three favorites, so get rid of the other 17.’ Because it was summertime, I pretty much got my life down to one big backpack that I could wear over my back. It wasn’t all I owned, but all I needed. Because it’s summer, you just need some board shorts, your flip-flops, a pair of tennis shoes, a few Tshirts, some button-downs, a nice pair of jeans, your toothbrush, sunscreen, Greatest Salesman in the World book, couple of scripts — whatever the recent project is. Laptop is optional. I don’t have to really have that, I can just work off a BlackBerry if I need to, and a couple of journals to write in … ”
FOR MCCONAUGHEY, 2007 BROUGHT not only the filming of three new films (Fool’s Gold, Tropic Thunder, and Surfer, Dude), but also the launch of his website, MatthewMcConaughey.com. He says of his website, with a home page that pictures young McConaughey holding a pool cue and standing before a trailer and barbecue grill, “If you want to know more about me, or what I’m into, that’s the place to go.” He also became a music producer, working with the Rastafarian singer Mishka, another journey filled with coincidences and unexpected lucky breaks. He fell in love with Mishka’s music while in Jamaica in 1999, but when he couldn’t find any additional albums, he tried to track Mishka down. It was tougher than he thought it would be, requiring years of searching. “We joked about making a documentary cal led Finding Mishka,” he says.
They finally connected, in a typically McConaughey believe- it-or-not way. “He invited me down to Nevis to stay with his mom and his dad and his wife and two kids, so I threw on my backpack, flew to Nevis, and went down there and hung out with this guy whose music I love,” he says. “We hiked in the jungle, we went to the waterfalls, we went out on the beach, we cooked and ate with his family, we hung out with his kids. I stayed in their guesthouse. After dinner, we’d go in the garage and listen to old cassette tapes of his old music that hadn’t even been released and we’d start talking music.” McConaughey launched j.k. livin’ Music, and the first album, by Mishka, will be released this year.
What else does 2008 hold? “It’s going to be a lot more!” he says. “It’s going to be … ” Suddenly, he pauses, and you can hear the sound of the highway once again. “Oh, man, I may have just missed my exit. No problem. The year’s going to hold a little bit of this here. If you miss your exit, you just cut over to the next one.”
Because for Matthew McConaughey, the next exit — the road not traveled — is always the best route toward the future.
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