Matthew McConaughey’s New Book Covers His Childhood, Career and Life With Camila Alves: 10 Takeaways From ‘Greenlights’

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Matthew McConaughey’s New Book Covers His Childhood, Career and Life With Camila Alves: 10 Takeaways From ‘Greenlights’

Alright, alright, alright. It’s safe to say Matthew McConaughey has lived a colorful life — and he details his childhood, career and marriage to Camila Alves in his new book, Greenlights. The 50-year-old actor was born in Texas to James McConaughey and Mary Kathlene McCabe in 1969. “I am the youngest brother of three and the son of parents who were twice divorced and thrice married, to each other,” McConaughey wrote in his memoir, released on Tuesday, October 20. “My dad wasn’t there the day I was born. He called my mom and said, ‘Only thing I have to say is if it’s a boy, don’t name him Kelly.’” After a complicated childhood (more on that later), McConaughey got his big break in the 1993 film Dazed and Confused. “Over the years I’ve come to call the kind of line in a script that can send me flying a ‘launchpad’ line,” he recalled. “This script was for Dazed and Confused. The line that sent me into flight was: ‘That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.’” He went on to make a name for himself starring in a series of romantic comedies, including 2001’s The Wedding Planner, 2003’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, 2006’s Failure to Launch, 2008’s Fool’s Gold and 2009’s Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. “The romantic comedies remained my only consistent box office hits, which made them my only consistent incoming offers,” he wrote. "For me personally, I enjoyed being able to give people a nitty-minute breezy romantic getaway from the stress of their lives where they didn’t have to think about anything, just watch the boy chase the girl, fall down, then get up and finally get her. I had taken the baton from Hugh Grant, and I ran with it.” [jwplayer 33zJgBw7-l3ahXupL] While McConaughey wrote that he was “never too bothered” by the “consistent critical write-offs” of his work, he eventually grew tired of filming rom-coms. “I enjoyed making romantic comedies, and their paychecks rented the houses on the beach I ran shirtless on. Getting relative with this inevitability, no way was this working-class country boy going to be condescending about the opportunities they gave me, no matter how categorized they were,” he wrote, later revealing that he turned down $14.5 million to make a rom-com in 2010. “I declined the offer. If I couldn’t do what I wanted, I wasn’t going to do what I didn’t, no matter the price.” Scroll through for the biggest takeaways from Greenlights, and pick up a copy in bookstores now for more:

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He Was ‘Blackmailed’ Into Losing His Virginity

McConaughey began his book with “some facts” to help him “set the table,” including some revelations about his relationship with sex.

“I was blackmailed into having sex for the first time when I was 15. I was certain I was going to hell for the premarital sex. Today, I am merely certain that I hope that’s not the case,” he wrote.

The Oscar winner also revealed that he was “molested by a man when I was eighteen while knocked unconscious in the back of a van.”

He concluded, “I’ve never felt like a victim. I have a lot of proof that the world is conspiring to make me happy.”

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His Parents’ Messy Relationship

According to McConaughey, his parents had a very toxic relationship. He recalled one night when Mary allegedly broke James’ nose and held up a knife at him. After the fight, they had sex.

“This is how my parents communicated. This is why Mom handed Dad an invite to their own wedding and said, ‘You got twenty-four hours to decide, lemme know.’ This is why my Mom and Dad were married three times and divorced twice—to each other,” he wrote. “This is why my Dad broke Mom’s middle finger to get it out of his face four separate times. This is how my Mom and Dad loved each other.”

He also wrote that he was “an accident” after they welcomed his oldest brother, Michael, and adopted his brother Pat.

McConaughey explained, “Mom and Dad had been trying to make a baby for years to no avail, so Mom thought I was a tumor until the fifth month of pregnancy. Dad went to the bar instead of the hospital the day I was born, because he suspected I wasn’t his anyway. But I was.”

James died in 1992 while having sex with Mary.

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His Childhood

McConaughey recalled getting “ass whuppings” and his mouth washed out by his parents during his childhood. He also claimed his father once hit him in the facefor stealing pizza.

“I’ve often regretted what I did — or didn’t do — that night. I had my chance at my rite of passage — to become his boy or a man in his eyes — but I got stage fright, pissed my pants, and failed the test. I choked,” he wrote.

Later in the book, McConaughey wrote he proved himself to his dad when he beat up a bouncer in front of him. “That night was my rite of passage. Dad let me in,” he recalled. “It was the night I became his boy, a man in his eyes. The night we became friends.”

McConaughey had founder memories of high school. “My senior year in high school, I was rolling. I had straight A’s, a job that kept forty-five bucks in my back pocket at all times, a four handicap in golf, I’d won ‘Most Handsome’ in my class, and was dating the best-looking girl at my school and at the school across town. Yeah, I was catching greenlights,” he wrote, noting that his father attempted to sue a company that produced an oil product that gave McConaughey acne for “emotional distress” but lost the case due to his “Most Handsome” yearbook win.

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His Time in Australia

During McConaughey’s time as an exchange student in Australia, he had six different jobs, including a bank teller, a boat mechanic, a photo processor, a barrister’s assistant, a construction worker and an assistant golf pro. He was 18 years old and down to 140 pounds.

“My identity shaken, I needed some resistance to find my footing, something to overcome, a discipline to adhere to, a sense of purpose, so I could better maintain my sanity in the strange place I was in. I decide to become a vegetarian,” he said, adding he ate "a head of iceberg lettuce with ketchup on it" for dinner and started running. "I got very thin. I also decided to become abstinent for the rest of the year, which still had nine months in it. I started believing that my life’s calling was to become a monk. I made plans to go to South Africa after my year’s exchange and free Nelson Mandela.”

He concluded that his time abroad “shaped” who he is today, writing, “A year when I found myself because I was forced to. A year that also planted the seeds of a nation that continues to guide me: Life’s hard. S—t happens to us. We make s—t happen.”

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‘Dazed and Confused’ Memories

After signing with a local talent agency in Texas, McConaughey started as a hand model. When he landed his role as Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, he was doing an impression of one of his brothers. Once filming began, McConaughey revealed he was put into a scene that wasn’t in the initial script and his now-iconic “Alright, alright, alright” line was born.

“Now, there were no lines written and this was my first time on a film set. I’d never done this before. Anxious, I started going back over in my head who my man is,” he wrote. "A film that my character had only three scripted scenes in, a film that I ended up working on for three weeks. Now, 28 years later, those words follow me everywhere. People say them. People steal them. people wear them on their hats and T-shirts. People have them tattooed on their arms and inner thighs."

He added, "Those three words are the very first words I said on the very first night of a job I had that I thought might be nothing but a hobby, but turned into a career.”

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His Relationship With Fame and God

As McConaughey’s star rose, he struggled. “The Friday before opening weekend [of A Time to Kill in 1996], there were one hundred scripts I wanted to do. Ninety-nine nos. One yes. The Monday after? Ninety-nine yeses. One no. Wow. Awesome. S—t,” he recalled. “What was real? What was not? The sky just opened ups o me and it was tough to feel the ground beneath my feet. My differential split, my spiritual foundation in flight, I needed some gravity. It was time to bend my knee bone.”

While his career took off, his relationship with his mom was “strenuous” for eight years as she was more enamored with fame than he was. He cited Mary giving a tour of his childhood home to a TV station without telling him as a turning point.

McConaughey’s relationship with God also went through ups and downs, noting that he took a 22-day to the Amazon after a dream about floating down the Amazon river. “Still wrestling with my identity, I was guilt-ridden over sins of my past, lonely, and disgusted with the company I was keeping, my own,” he wrote, noting he stripped naked and was nothing but “a child of God.”

He took the role of Palmer Joss opposite Jodie Foster in Robert Zemeckis’s Contact after the trip.

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He Almost Quit Acting

After his success with romantic comedies in the '00s, McConaughey started to feel like an entertainer instead of an actor.

“I was getting much more inner growth from my travels than from my career. I loved sales, education, music, and sports,” he wrote. “I considered changing professions, maybe start writing short stories and travelogues, going into advertising, or becoming a teacher, a musician, or a football coach. I didn’t know.”

During the fall of 2008, he called his agent and said he was done with rom-coms. “I wet the floor with my tears talking to Camila about this decision. We cried. We prayed. We made a deal,” he wrote. “A sense of humor helped me cope, a strong woman by my side kept me steadfast, and an infant son and newborn daughter to raise kept me busy. Together, they all helped me navigate my self-induced hiatus from Hollywood.”

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Meeting Camila

McConaughey met his now-wife after he had a dream about being an 88-year-old bachelor. “I had met, spent time with, and seriously dated some wonderful women in my life, many of whom I am still friends with today, but ultimately they were all stops, no stays. In my mid-thirties, I was looking for a lifetime lover, a best friend, and a mother to be. I was looking for more, I was looking for the one, I was looking for her,” he wrote. “So, I quit looking for her. Then, she came.”

McConaughey and Alves crossed paths at Hyde on Sunset and has been smitten ever since. “Fifteen years later, she’s still the only woman I’ve ever wanted to take on a date, sleep with, or wake up next to,” he wrote. The twosome fell in love while he lived in Australia filming Fool’s Gold with Kate Hudson.

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Marrying Camila

When the couple found out that they were expecting their eldest son, Levi, his mother was upset that they weren’t married, but McConaughey was thrilled.

“Tears of joy began to run down my cheeks. I looked her way. She was crying the same tears. The photograph was an ultrasound. She was pregnant. We cried, we laughed, we danced. The only thing I ever knew I wanted to be was a father,” he wrote.

McConaughey and Alves went on to welcome daughter Vida in 2010 and son Livingston in 2012. He popped the question in 2011 after their eldest son asked why his mother’s last name wasn’t McConaughey. The twosome exchanged vows during a three-day wedding weekend with 88 guests in 2012.

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Losing Weight for ‘Dallas Buyers Club’

After taking a break from acting, McConaughey revealed his “anonymity and unfamiliarity had bred creativity” for filmmakers. He subsequently landed roles in The Lincoln Lawyer, Killer Joe, Bernie, The Paperboy, Mud, Magic Mike and Dallas Buyers Club, which won him his first Oscar.

“Weighing 182 pounds at the time, I had a lot of weight to lose. Five months out from our agreed upon start date, I began shedding weight,” he wrote about Dallas Buyers Club, revealing he ate three egg whites for breakfast, five ounces of fish and a cup of steamed vegetables for lunch and dinner and “as much wine” as he wanted as his diet. “At 157 pounds, with more to lose, I received a call from Martin Scorsese offering me the two-day role of the broker-mentor Mark Hanna to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in the film The Wolf of Wall Street. Remember what I said about those launchpad lines? When I read the script and saw that Mark Hanna’s secret to successful stock brokering was cocaine and hookers, I took flight.”

He added, “We made Dallas Buyers Club for 4.9 million dollars in 25 days. We did not ask permission. We did not flinch. We took the hill. I got down to 135.”

At the end of his book, McConaughey explained he had a list of 10 goals from 1992 and revealed he had accomplished three big ones, including “become a father, find and keep the woman for me, win an Oscar for best actor.”