Matthew McConaughey Interview The Tonight Show Transcript December 14

Jimmy Fallon: (00:00) Thank you for doing This Christmas Will Be Different. I appreciate you doing that. We hung out all day together. Matthew McConaughey: (00:04) How fun was that? Jimmy Fallon: (00:05) It was the greatest. We always... Matthew McConaughey: (00:07) Two take maximum. Two take maximum. Jimmy Fallon: (00:09) We nailed it, we have some good takes. That was so much fun. Happy holidays to you and your family. I'm happy to see you in person. Thanks for making the trip and being here. Matthew McConaughey: (00:18) Absolutely. Jimmy Fallon: (00:19) Do you have like family traditions? Do you have holiday plans? What do you have coming up? Matthew McConaughey: (00:24) This year, we're going to get all the McConaughey family. We're also getting Camila's family. So when we do that and we have that multicultural Christmas, Christmas lasts a long time at our place because they celebrate on the 24th. Midnight you exchange presents. All right. So you have the big sit down dinner, you get the china out for the first time all year. If it was up to my family, it'd be paper plates. Thank you, Camila for getting the china out and having a better ritual. Jimmy Fallon: (00:50) No, we are using china. Matthew McConaughey: (00:51) Yes. Jimmy Fallon: (00:52) Thank you, Camila. Matthew McConaughey: (00:53) We do that that night. And then we get up the next day and we do our Christmas, which is everyone opens present. Santa came. The problem, the reason I say it's longer already is that my mother who's 90 still demands that everyone open their present and everyone watch one person open their present at the time. Jimmy Fallon: (01:09) Yeah. Yeah. Matthew McConaughey: (01:10) You've got a big Brazilian family, you've got a big McConaughey family, there's a family of 20. There's a lot of presents, thankfully. It may be dark on the 25th when we're done opening presents from that morning. And so seven o'clock PM and you just finished opening presents from Christmas morning. So the nights get long. Jimmy Fallon: (01:26) My grandma used to do this thing where we would unwrap the presents. She goes, can you just not rip it just so I can reuse the wrapping. Matthew McConaughey: (01:32) Save the wrapping. Jimmy Fallon: (01:33) Save the wrap for the next year. I go, yes, okay, grandma. Matthew McConaughey: (01:36) It's 3:00 PM. Jimmy Fallon: (01:36) Let's go. Let's open up the thing. Yeah. It's so fun. I look forward to it. Are you a guy that makes New Year's resolutions? Matthew McConaughey: (01:43) Yeah. I check in on myself. Jimmy Fallon: (01:46) You check in on yourself. Matthew McConaughey: (01:49) I asked myself to work on my patience last year on New Year's Eve. Jimmy Fallon: (01:55) We all need to do that. Matthew McConaughey: (01:57) And now thank you for reminding me, I guess tonight, I'll start thinking about how I've done the last 11 months. Jimmy Fallon: (02:01) Exactly right. Well, I think last time we talked, I mean, congratulations, your book, Green Lights, was on the New York Times' bestseller list 50, 5-0, 50 weeks. It sold like two and a half million copies. It is a giant, giant hit. But congratulations. I loved it. Matthew McConaughey: (02:18) Thank you. Jimmy Fallon: (02:19) Did you realize it would take off like that? I mean so many people. Matthew McConaughey: (02:22) I had no idea. Jimmy Fallon: (02:23) It's massive. Matthew McConaughey: (02:24) It hit a nerve. Thank you everyone out there who had a read of it. Jimmy Fallon: (02:29) It was so honest and it was so... I loved it. I told you as soon as I read it, I couldn't stop reading it. I go, oh, it's so personal, but it's so also universal. Matthew McConaughey: (02:39) Yep. I think that's what people got from it. People said, hey, I see myself and you, I see my stories in your stories. And it kind of lays out a map of process. It's a process book. It's not a product book. It's a approach to life with this rodeo we're all trying to get through and trying to get our eight seconds on. How can we do our best to get it? Jimmy Fallon: (02:59) You're coming out with a journal now, a companion journal to help people. Because I think you were saying in the book too, it's tough when you write to just tell someone, hey, just write something down every day or every night. Matthew McConaughey: (03:12) A blank sheet of paper intimidates the heck out of us. Right? Jimmy Fallon: (03:15) It does. Matthew McConaughey: (03:15) But journaling or writing things down I've done it all my life and it's how I wrote Green Lights the book. Immensely valuable. I mean, I write things down to forget. If you write them down, you can forget them because they're in there. Don't just go to the diary or the journal to write down when you're frustrated and confused. Go to the journal to write down what you're doing in life when you're rolling, when you're catching green lights, when you're in the flow, because we will get out of flow again. And it's nice to have a document to go back and go, hoo, what was I doing when I was cruising? Jimmy Fallon: (03:44) Yeah. When life was perfect there in that moment. Matthew McConaughey: (03:46) You see habits and you can change and recalibrate. But yeah, it's a journal. I got little nudges along the way that kind of help you and ask you some questions to write your story. The book Green Lights was my story. This is for your story. Jimmy Fallon: (03:57) Ah, I love that buddy. That's awesome. Congrats on that. Matthew McConaughey: (04:02) Thank you. Jimmy Fallon: (04:03) We also, you were nice enough to Zoom into us when we couldn't get any guests anywhere. No one was allowed to travel or do anything, but there was talk of you maybe running for governor of Texas and you recently decided to not run for governor. Matthew McConaughey: (04:17) Yes. Jimmy Fallon: (04:17) Can you walk us through that decision? Matthew McConaughey: (04:19) Well, it was a to two year consideration that I came to the decision really over the last couple of months. And I was asking myself the original question and trying to answer it, how and where and what can I do to be most useful to myself, to my family and to the most amount of people. The embassy, the category of politics came up and it's a privileged one that I gave great consideration to. But at this point in my life are the things I've got a 13 year old, 11 year old and an eight year old, the life I'm living right now, the storytelling I want to keep doing, it's not the category for me at this point in my life. Jimmy Fallon: (04:51) Still not ruling out future. Matthew McConaughey: (04:53) I'm not until I am. Jimmy Fallon: (04:55) Okay. Matthew McConaughey: (04:56) Someone told me that was a very McConaughey answer the other day. Jimmy Fallon: (04:59) Not until I am. It's very, yeah. Matthew McConaughey: (05:02) I'll be keeping an eye open for- Jimmy Fallon: (05:03) Because I know Texas loves you. And when we did the show from Texas, you were nice enough to come on the show and gosh, you're beloved down there as well. You think people love you here, standing ovations. They love you there. Matthew McConaughey: (05:15) It's a great state. Jimmy Fallon: (05:16) I know you put on a benefit concert. What's [inaudible 00:05:20] We're Texas. After that rough, awful, devastating... Matthew McConaughey: (05:25) Winter storm Uru came through. We're not used to winter storms like that in Texas. Okay. We were a bit awkward. We weren't prepared. And a lot of people were out of home. A lot of people were out of school. A lot of people needed some help because they didn't know how to deal with it. And so we, my foundation, which is the Just Keep Livin Foundations, we got together and said, we're not disaster relief, but want to be disaster relief. We said, let's go. And I headed to Texas. I got on the phone, Camilla got on the phone. 100% of the people we called, whether it was companies who donated, whether it was musicians who came in, everybody was a yes in the first 30 seconds. We went down to Texas, put the show on. We raised over $7.7 million, which is still being put out to our community. Jimmy Fallon: (06:05) That's how you do it right there. You just stepped up. And I go, oh my gosh, what do you know about putting on a live concert? You're like, nothing. Matthew McConaughey: (06:12) It was like takes today. You get one take, two maximum, but let's throw it together. Because you have to. Disaster relief, you have to move quickly because if you take your time to say, oh, this has got to be perfect. Something else is taking the front page news. There's another disaster coming, you know? So you need to jump on it quickly and get everyone together and take advantage of trying to get people to give at that time when it is front page news and they know people need help. Jimmy Fallon: (06:36) I saw Hollywood Reporter named you philanthropist of the year with all the stuff you do to give back. Matthew McConaughey: (06:41) That was cool. Jimmy Fallon: (06:44) It's good to be you, but it's also great to give back and it's great. You know what you do? You show up. Every time you always show up for me, but I think for anything. I know you're a great dad. Matthew McConaughey: (06:56) Thank you. Try to. I think we all try to. I think we learn more and more as we age, we serve ourself when we do serve others. That is a reciprocity little exchange right there. And then also there's ways to serve ourself and serve others at the same time and where those two meet when we're filling our bank account and our souls account at the same time, we're getting the quantity and the quality at the same time. Honey, ho. Jimmy Fallon: (07:20) That's what I'm talking about. I want to talk about and show a clip from Sing 2. More with Matthew McConaughey when we come back. Everybody come on back.