Matthew McConaughey was a guest on The Howard Stern Show yesterday to promote his new memoir, Greenlights — and in the conversation, he revealed that he and his mother were estranged for eight years, after he caught her leaking stories about him to the press.
As Matthew explains it, the trouble started as soon as he got famous.
“I was calling my mom at that time after I’d gotten famous, needing to talk to my mom,” he said, adding that his life felt "unbalanced" in the wake of his newfound fame. “And my mom was not the only one on the phone. The woman that was on the phone was a fan. Of my fame.”
"I would have conversations and then all of a sudden — whoop — what we’d talk about would end up in the paper three days later,” he said. “I was like, ‘Mom, that was between us.’”
Matthew said he begged his mom to stop leaking stories about him to the media, but she continued to do it behind his back. And things really reached a boiling point when she went on the '90s tabloid show Hard Copy and gave viewers an invasive and embarrassing tour of his childhood home.
"There's Mom, giving someone a tour through the house, [saying] 'Here's where I caught him with so-and-so in bed. Here's where I saw him in the shower, you know what he was doing in there, ha ha ha.'"
"And I call her up, and I go, 'Mom, what did you do?' And she goes, 'What are you talking about?'"
Though she initially tried to play dumb about the Hard Copy appearance, she eventually admitted to Matthew why she did it: "I didn't think you'd find out," she told him.
"She was always still my mom, but she became a different person," Matthew said. "I just had to make some boundaries. And it was a strenuous relationship for eight years."
On the brighter side, Matthew went on to say that he's forgiven his mother, and that they're "back completely now."
And he added that these days, he's much more comfortable letting her enjoy the limelight:
Once I got my career sort of stable and felt on my feet, I let go of the reins and said, "Go get it, Mom. Whatever you want. There's the camera." And she's been awesome. She's got incredible stuff to say and do. And I'm like, go for it.
"It was tough for eight years, but we went through it, and we're on the other side of it," he concluded.
You can check out Matthew's full conversation with Howard Stern below:
