A decade after leaving L.A., McConaughey explained to 'Southern Living' why he made the drastic decision.
Matthew McConaughey revealed in a new interview with Southern Living the real reason he moved his family from their “happy” Los Angeles home to Texas back in 2014. McConaughey shares three children with his wife of 12 years, Camila Alves.
As Alves puts it: “We were living a happy life in Malibu. We had a beautiful house that we’d built together and put a lot of love and care into. We were raising our kids there. I was growing everything in the yard. I had bees making honey.”
But an emergency concerning McConaughey’s mother and brothers, which the star declined to disclose, saw the family take a supposedly temporary journey back to his home state. During the trip, Alves asked her husband, “You want to move here, don’t you?”
He answered “yes” almost immediately. McConaughey recalled to Alves of the moment: “And you went—”
“You son of a bitch,” she finished.
McConaughey admitted that Alves was originally nervous to move to Texas. The only American states the Brazilian-native had lived in were New York and Los Angeles, a far cry from the Lone Star State. But she quickly fell into the rhythms of Texan living, finding it remarkably similar to her own childhood in Belo Horizonte.
“In Texas, we were going to the church that we like to attend every Sunday,” she explained. “Sports became a stronger tradition for the kids—”
“Ritual!” McConaughey interjected. “Ritual came back,” he enthused, “whether that was Sunday church, sports, dinner together as a family every night, or staying up after that telling stories in the kitchen, sitting at the island pouring drinks and nibbling while retelling them all in different ways than we told them before.”
“The gravity is very different in Texas,” Alves added.
Though they were originally brought there by less-than-fortunate circumstances, the move clearly benefited McConaughey’s entire family. He’s one of several Hollywood stars, including Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon, to move out of Hollywood.
His mother and brothers are doing fine now, as McConaughey offered Southern Living an update on his famously feisty mother, Kay. Or, as the True Detective star calls her, Ma Mac.
“She’s 91 and obviously kicking ass,” he laughed, attributing her longevity to “many reasons…One is her optimism: it’s not delusional, it is survival. The answer is ‘yes,’ that’s the word she lives off of.”
He added that she “does not stress. I’ve never seen someone forgive themself quicker than Ma Mac. No grudges. You do not go to bed with any kind of grudge on anyone else, or yourself. That’s Ma Mac.”
“I have learned big time with her,” Alves said of her mother-in-law.
You can check out Southern Living’s full profile on McConaughey and Alves here.
