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Matthew McConaughey has lived an interesting, Huckleberry Finn-esque life, and he is not shy about sharing the details, as evidenced by his popular Greenlights book. His latest revelation is that he absconded to Peru to essentially “find himself” back in the 90s.
The Oscar winning actor recently revealed that he once exiled himself from Hollywood and spent 22 days in Peru without electricity when the pressures of early fame became too much to handle. He went exclusively by the name Mateo during the trip to further separate himself from his celebrity identity.
Matthew McConaughey revealed he vanished to Peru for three weeks under the alias “Mateo” after the release of A Time to Kill
The trip came after McConaughey starred in the 1996 legal thriller A Time to Kill, which was his first leading role after breaking out in Dazed and Confused three years earlier.
McConaughey said that after he became famous, he felt like he “no longer met strangers” and began questioning which parts of his life were real. His solution was to disappear entirely in South America.
“I needed to get my feet on the ground. 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,” the Oscar winner said on the No Magic Pill podcast.
“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 bulls—… I needed to meet people who knew me as Mateo. 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.’”
The reactions to the insight into McConaughey’s extremely actor brain were ones of humor and indignation, as many people felt he was “LARPing” as a poor person.
“This the funniest s— I’ve ever read,” read one viral response.
“Some actors are incredible because they don’t know who they are and thus can “become” anyone. Some actors are incredible because they approach acting with the same physicality you’d approach fitness and performance with. And some are incredible because they are beautifully stupid,” a second popular post summarized.
“This is the sort of LARP you can earnestly engage in (for under a month btw) when no one is allowed to tell you how full of it you actually are,” a third added.
McConaughey is gearing up for the release of his new movie The Rivals of Amziah King, which hits theaters on August 21 and will be his first theatrically-released film since 2019. Last year, he starred in The Lost Bus, but that was a straight-to-streaming movie on AppleTV.