Matthew McConaughey details tumultuous Hollywood career in his memoir “Green Lights”
Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey reflects on his turbulent Hollywood career including his brush with the law in 1999 for playing Bongos naked and loud, his decision to not do any more rom-coms and his career turnarounds and highlights in his new memoir titled “Green Lights” set to release on October 20.
Discussing his biography with The Times, the Interstellar actor revealed that he had lived in a trailer park, turned down roles for years and refused to play by Hollywood’s rules. He also narrates incidents from his childhood that had left a profound impact on him like the moment when his mother tried to kill his father with a kitchen knife when he was just 4-years-old.
The actor has been running a series of virtual events to promote this book and has conversations lined up with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on October 20, John Grisham on October 21, Kate Hudson on October 23, Woody Harrelson on October 26, Reese Witherspoon on October 30 and Ethan Hawke on November 7.
For UK readers, the 50-year-old is doing a virtual book tour hosted by FANE as part of which, the actor is scheduled to have a conversation with Idris Elba on October 20, 21 and 24.
Read the preface of the book below:
I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges – how to get relative with the inevitable – you can enjoy a state of success I call ‘catching greenlights.’
So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.
Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
It’s a love letter. To life.
It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights-and to realising that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.