Matthew McConaughey and wife Camila Alves fled from LA to Texas during family crisis
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Matthew McConaughey, 54, and his wife Camila Alves, 41, fled Hollywood and moved to Texas amid a family crisis, they revealed in a new Southern Living feature published Wednesday.
They originally made the move in 2014, and Alves — who met McConaughey in a West Hollywood nightclub in 2006 and married him in 2012 — opened up more about it.
“We were living a happy life in Malibu,” she said.
“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.”
The couple have three kids: Levi, 15, Vida, 14, and Livingston, 11.
According to the outlet, however, even though they had roots in California, they moved to Austin amid a family crisis involving McConaughey’s mother and two brothers, who needed their help.
Matthew’s mother, Mary Kathleen “Kay” McConaughey, and father, James, divorced each other twice, and remarried each other three times. James died while Matthew was filming his 1993 cult hit, “Dazed and Confused.”
“Nobody even thought about [acting] in our family,” Kay said on “Today” in 2019. “We were all jocks. [Matthew] wanted to be a lawyer, until [casting director] Don Phillips saw him in a bar. He said, ‘I need someone to play Wooderson in this movie, ‘Dazed and Confused.’ And Matthew said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’ ”
Matthew’s two brothers are Rooster, 69, and Pat, 62, who was adopted.
McConaughey’s friend and “True Detective” co-star, Woody Harrelson, has also previously said that he might be Matthew’s brother.
During an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, The “How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days” star told of a possible romance his mom, Kay, had with Harrelson’s dad, Charles, during the time his parents were divorcing.
Harrelson chimed in, “I have known Ma’ Mac [Matthew’s mother] a long time, and she goes, ‘I knew … your father.’ And it was the ellipses I found a little troubling, or interesting. ‘I knew your father.’ ” Harrelson added her pause was “filled with innuendo.”
After McConaughey and Alves moved to Texas temporarily in 2014 amid the unspecified crisis with McConaughey’s mother and brothers, Alves told Southern Living that she noticed how “peaceful” and “energetic” McConaughey was in his home state.
“You want to move here, don’t you?” she recalled asking him.
He laughed in response, and said: “Let’s do it.”
After they relocated their family, sports became a stronger presence in their kids’ lives, as did church.
“Ritual!” McConaughey said. “Ritual came back, 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.”
Another reason to move to the Lone Star state is that McConaughey said that he believes that to be,“full-blown shaking hands with where you were conceived,” means being closer to your “essence,” he said.
He was born in 1969 near Fort Davis, Texas.
“Time slowed down,” he reflected about life in Texas. “The clock was right, the body clock. And part of that is ritual; part of that is just the distance between places and the way people move. But it’s also the hospitality, the courtesy, the common sense, the lack of drama.”
Other celebs who prefer to raise their families outside of Hollywood include this year’s Oscar front-runner, “Oppenheimer” star Cillian Murphy, 47, who has spoken about his low-key life in Dublin, Ireland, and Chris Hemsworth, 40, who moved his wife Elsa Pataky, 47, and three kids to the town of Byron Bay, Australia, which has a population of less than 10,000.
“We were starting to have a lot of attention in LA,” Pataky told The Post in 2018. “And when you have kids, it’s more complicated. We wanted to live in a nature place where the kids could grow up away from the attention.”
Danny McBride, who created and currently stars in HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones,” also moved his family away from Hollywood to Charleston, South Carolina.
In 2019, McBride told The Post, “I had never been to [Charleston] before, and we shot ‘Vice Principals’ there. I just fell in love with the city. I went back to LA and we were like the cast of ‘Lost,’ like, ‘We have to get back to the island!’
“So, we moved down there.”
