Key Points
Matthew McConaughey talks about the 22 days he spent rediscovering himself in Peru, after filming A Time to Kill in 1995.
During his self-imposed exile, the famous actor went by “Mateo.”
“It reaffirmed my own identity that, ‘Oh, I still got it. This is based on me,‘” he said of the life-changing trip.
Just as Matthew McConaughey was becoming a household name, he fled Hollywood for a place he could be completely anonymous: Ilo, a port city in southern Peru.
The actor had just wrapped filming 1996’s A Time to Kill, the John Grisham adaptation starring Sandra Bullock and Samuel L. Jackson. “The world was a mirror,” he recalled on the No Magic Pill podcast, with total strangers telling him how much they loved him.
Matthew McConaughey in ‘A Time to Kill’
Credit: Warner Bros/Everett
“I needed to get my feet on the ground,” he told host Blake Mycoskie. “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 adulation for this and that and the other. And I’m trying to decipher which part’s real, which part’s bulls–t.”
As part of his self-discovery journey, McConaughey, then 26, went by “Mateo,” the Spanish form of his name.
For 22 days, he lived off the grid without electricity. The first half of his exile was “wonky,” he admitted. “But the last 10 days were great. I was now at the place long enough to go, ‘I could live this. This could be my existence.'”
As we know, McConaughey did in fact return to Hollywood — and with an improved mindset he got from the people who had no idea he was a famous actor.
“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,” he said. “It reaffirmed my own identity that, ‘Oh, I still got it. This is based on me.'”
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McConaughey previously talked about his Peruvian adventure to The New York Times in 1996.
Calling it “the best decision in the world,” he said his days hiking through the jungle helped him to “respect and appreciate what I had just done” on the set of A Time to Kill. “So when I came back [to Hollywood], I was prepared.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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