Awkward alert! Matthew McConaughey explained in a new interview that his family wasn’t so sure that his wife, Camila Alves, would accept his sweet 2011 Christmas Day proposal.
Chatting with Esquire for its November 2016 cover story, the actor, 46, recounted the nerve-racking moment.
“I remember hitting the knee, looking into her eyes and…I remember her face. I remember this smile coming up from her feet. I remember her having to catch her breath. And she didn’t say yes right away,” McConaughey recalled. “And then the whole family was going, Jeezus, she’s gonna say no.”
The True Detective star — who married Alves, 34, in June 2012 — previously opened up about the nail-biting experience of asking for the Brazilian model’s hand in marriage during a 2012 interview with Jay Leno.
“At Christmastime, we go around our family and everyone takes turns opening presents,” he recalled. “So I had wrapped the engagement ring in about eight different boxes deep, so she would keep opening boxes to get with it.’”
The Oscar winner — who first met his spouse at a bar in 2006 — continued: “We finally got to her, and I’m calling my family over … She gets to it, she opens it up, her eyes go wide. I take a knee and I ask her, ‘Will you marry me and take my name?’”
While Alves — with whom McConaughey now shares kids Levi, 8, Vida, 6, and Livingston, 3 — did not immediately say yes, she eventually came around.
“The first words out of her mouth were not yes. I’m not gonna say what it was,” he teased. “But I did say, ‘Look, I’m down on a knee. I’ll stay here awhile. I will outlast you.’ And I did! She conceded.”
