Matthew McConaughey shared that he relocated to Peru under a fake name to escape the intense spotlight of ’90s fame.
Matthew McConaughey is accustomed to traveling internationally in addition to intergalactic travel. The Oscar winner disclosed that, following the success of his 1996 film A Time to Kill, he needed a vacation from the spotlight and temporarily left Hollywood for Peru.
“I needed to get my feet on the ground,” Matthew stated in the No Magic Pill with Blake Mycoskie podcast episode from May 5. “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.”
“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,” the 56-year-old shared his fame journey. “When you get famous, what happens is there’s a few salutations that are skipped and people stop asking your name or what you do.”
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During his 22-day reset in Peru, Matthew was able to establish connections with locals who were unaware of his celebrity position.
“I needed to meet people who knew me as Mateo. That was it,” the Dallas Buyers Club alum clarified. “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 and the experience and times we had together for 22 days.”
It's true that Matthew recovered from his time away from Hollywood. (In the end, he and his wife Camila Alves McConaughey chose to raise their children, Levi, 17, Vida, 15, and Livingston, 13, in Texas rather than Los Angeles.)
“I was now at the place long enough to go, ‘I could live this. This could be my existence,’” he went on to say. “As soon as you go, ‘I could do this,’ then you’re like, ‘Well, I can return home.’”
Additionally, as he stated, “It gave me self-identity again. It reaffirmed my own identity that, ‘Oh, I got it. This is based on me.’”