‘I want to sell some belief’: Matthew McConaughey shares his new book ‘Poems & Prayers’

Matthew McConaughey is a tried-and-true Texan, an Oscar-winning actor, the University of Texas at Austin’s minister of culture, a guy who somehow makes most commercials far less annoying, a dad, a husband, and many other things – including a best-selling author.

His first book, the extremely personal memoir “Greenlights,” published in 2020 and included journal pages and poetry sprinkled throughout. His new book, “Poems & Prayers,” is available today and is much more of the “just keep livin’” philosophy McConaughey has trademarked.

Listen to an extended interview with McConaughy in the audio player above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.

Texas Standard: How soon after “Greenlights” did you realize you weren’t done sharing your writing?

Matthew McConaughey: I knew I wanted to continue writing after I wrote “Greenlights” because that experience of writing it was so special to me. I kind of fell in love with it.

For so many decades, I didn’t have the confidence to write like that, and I remember I had this big treasure chest full of journals and I was like, “I think there might be something worth sharing in there.”

So I asked [my wife] Camila, I said, “hey Camila, when I die you mind going through this and seeing if there’s something worth sharing?” And she gave me the middle finger. She said, “no, you do it. Don’t put that on me.” And hence, I loaded them up. She kicked me out and said, “go away and see what you got.” And that turned out to be “Greenlights.”

And that process was so rewarding for me, personally. And then to have shared it and so many readers to have read it and it connected to them, very rewarding. So I knew I wanted to continue writing. What it was gonna be – I didn’t know.

A few years later, I found myself in a world now where I’m looking around at facts and evidence and going like, “oh man, I’m not seeing so many reasons to believe.” And so, I said, well, look, you’re writing poems, writing prayers. Those are ideals. Those are pursuits that are not necessarily in reality, but you can get reality from them.

So I said “well, let’s lean into that.” And I looked down and found a bunch of poems and prayers from my past and wrote a bunch a new ones. And that’s what I’ve got in this book. And hopefully it’s worth sharing.

“Poems & Prayers” sounds like a beautiful diversion from the muck of the world. And I think that you’re encouraging all of us to find that to some extent. But this project was also born of frustration, right?

Mm-hmm. I found myself a couple years ago, Lord, getting a little cynical. And I swore to myself a long time ago, I said, you know, I think that’s one of the worst chosen diseases that we can have, cynicism. You know, we’re born, we are innocent, then we’re naive, then we grow and we mature and we become skeptical. We need to stop there, because the next thing is cynicism.

And I see it being a disease of getting older that some people have. And yeah, it’s very clever; it can get the laugh at the party. It can be snark, and it can be full of doubt and sometimes accurate.

But – it means you quit believing, and I’m not ready to quit believing. I called myself out on it, and I said, “no, I’m not ready to,” and I have enough people around me that I know aren’t ready to stop believing, either.

I understand that we look around in the world and there’s not a long, long list that’s obvious of things to believe in and people to believe in. And being a man who said, “I’m not ready to give in to the doubt” – because if the doubt wins, we all lose – I want to sell some belief. It’s in short supply. I need it. And I talked to a whole lot of other people that need it.

And I’m not only talking about belief in God; personally, I am, for me, but for a lot of people, my agnostic friends, I am talking about belief in self, belief in others, belief in tomorrow, belief in their children, whatever that may be. Belief is in short supply, and I think we need it to survive.

It feels like I see from you that you feel a responsibility to be a citizen, right? I mean there’s been talk of you entering politics yourself. You were present after the Uvalde shooting with the victims of your former hometown.

You’re not running for office, but you’re just saying, “hey people, I feel this – can we do something about it?” Is that fair?

Yeah, I think it is to some extent. I don’t know how much it’s me feeling responsible. There is some of that, and I understand my position in life, but I also don’t really move out of responsibility’s sake. I’m moving out of what moves me, and then it’s something that I want to do that I feel is important that is, hopefully, aligned with … something that’s a good thing to do.

So I’ve been in movies. I wrote for the last six years. I’ve got my first movie, “The Lost Bus,” coming out … I think it’s been eight years. I didn’t know that. I thought it’d been like a year or two. Someone told me it’s been eight.

I mean, to write books, to share “Greenlights,” to write “Poems & Prayers,” to investigate other avenues of leadership, whether that be in politics or somewhere else. It’s just something I called on myself to go – look, when I write, when I do movies, I’m performing a character written by someone else, directed by someone, lensed in a camera by someone else and edited by someone else.

And I was like, “well, let’s get rid of the filters.” What if you go write and direct and lens and edit your own thing? Which is where the writing came from.

And I’ve also sort of existentially trying to challenge myself going like, “okay, you go play characters in movies. Well, who are you in the documentary of your life, McConaughey?” You know what I mean? What’s going on in this big show that we’re all in where action was called the day we were born and cut will be called the date we leave here? You know, what are you doing? So that’s been a challenge I’ve been throwing on myself.

It’s been quite a conscientious challenge, and I have to watch that it doesn’t become overly self-serious or I’m absolutely no fun to be around. But I’ve tried to, you know, I think the poems and prayers were the natural next one because they do rhyme. It is musical. They do feel like a Saturday on a Monday.

They still can be aspirational. They still can be responsible. They can be silly, and they have humor, but they’re still in that column of, I think, something good to share that I think we could all use, and I know I could.

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You talked about getting the confidence to write and to share your writing. And, to me, you take that to the nth degree. You’re not just writing about your life. You’re writing about some things that I think others would find embarrassing or even shameful.

You share your poems from when you’re 18. I mean, there’s one here called “Deuces,” right? That just made me laugh. But I guess I want to know, like, how and why you got this way – like you said, no filter?

So look, when I went away with those journals that time after my wife kicked me out and said, “go see what you got,” trust me, the first 10 days of reading through them, a lot of shame, a lot guilt, a lot of, “oh my God, I can’t believe you were such a, you know, this guy or that guy or you were such an arrogant little prick, McConaughey,” whatever it was.

But after 10 days of being stuck with that and reading and seeing over and over, oh, I stepped in, you know what? Ah, over and over I malaprop the situation. I was overconfident. Over and over, I noticed that after those times, I got humbled. Something happened in my life that humbled me.

And what I started to notice, I was like, well, then you can’t disregard the times where you were not who you wished you would be or the times you were arrogant or even rude or mean, because those are the things that allowed you to get humbled later on and learn something.

So the guilt and the shame started to turn into giggles. I started laughing at myself going, “boy, this is just a rinse, rinse, wash, repeat.” You keep doing this, but everyone does that. Right?

There’s a cycle and a rhythm to that with everyone’s life. We take aim, we think we have something, and it doesn’t go as planned. Well, we look back and we go, “oh my gosh, I can’t believe you were so self-assured” or whatever that was. And that becomes a rhythm. And I think that’s okay.

So I wanted to add those things. And because that’s the rhythms of life, not only for me, I hear that from all kinds of people and to share those rhythms and say, “hey, that’s all part of the song.” As T Bone Burnett says, “even when you’re lost and wobbly and looking, if you just stick at it, you’ll find a song.”

That reminds me of a thing from “Greenlights.” You have this reputation, I think, as a dreamer even a slacker. It’s that “Wooderson” character, maybe the bongos. But there was a story in “Greenlights” that I tell other people and I’m like, “wait a minute, that Matthew McConaughey is a hard worker.”

It’s the treehouse story. I’ve tried to build a treehouse a couple of times in my youth. I got like two little rungs in the tree and I was like “this is hard, I’m done.” I’m good at other things.

But you really threw yourself into this treehouse, just as an example. Do you think that you’re misunderstood? It’s kind of the way you’ve described it, too – it’s like you work hard to dream or something like that? You would put it better.

Yeah, I work hard to dream. I prepare so I can play.

I believe I’m quite intentional, and the people who know me best tell me I’m quite intentional and deliberate. To use a sports metaphor, I pretty much go through the playbook to a great extent. So, when I show up on the field, I can call audibles or have the freedom to call audibles because I feel like I’m prepared and know the plays. That’s what I try to get to.

So I think part of that comes off – what I’m saying is, am I relaxed? Sometimes, I like it when I am … it’s why I like to leave on time, so I can take my time to get where I’m going. You know what I mean? I’d rather just have a day where my stuff’s planned out and I can saunter through it at my own pace and rhythm because I know where I am supposed to be and where I wanna be and kind of what the day anticipates.

Now, that doesn’t always go as planned, obviously. And, you know, like all of us, I’m trying to get better with calling the audibles when something doesn’t go as planned. But I don’t want to make the easy stuff hard – and the hard stuff’s coming.

And I don’t like the feeling of not being prepared for a role or for my marriage or for fatherhood … I don’t like that feeling. So as much as I have to deal with the new things that I didn’t plan on coming, I have a baseline of trying to be prepared for most things.

Is there a poem you’d share with us?

How about, you wanna hear “Tips Included?”

Let’s do it.

So this is based on – I was always like, kind of never understood the participation trophies. All right? And I feel like we overcompensated a little bit. And that idea parlays into also the times where I think we, myself, others, rely on fate so much that we take our hands off the wheel.

And so the idea behind this poem is that, yeah, if you believe in fate, great. And if you’re a believer in God – I don’t think God or us wants us to have our hands off the wheel. That self-reliance and faith are not contradictory. So, keep your hands on the wheel.

You’re going on tour with “Poems & Prayers.” And this isn’t any old book tour. You’re sharing big stages with musicians, including at the Bass Concert Hall here in Austin. What should folks expect from that?

Yeah, so the idea was, “hey, you want to go to bookstores and sign books, McConaughey?” I said, yeah, but I want to do something more fun with that. And then I said “well, what if I just show up in parks and start reading poems and see who shows up?” And I said that’s a good idea, but let’s even go further.

And so then we said, look, let’s get dates and theaters and do some poem readings. And locked that down and then I was like, “so many of these poems are musical – what if I invited some friends of mine, they’re musicians, to come on stage?”

And so, what you’ll see in Austin and Bass is I’ll come onstage and sort of set the table with an opening sort of 15-18 minute sort of platform of why we’re here, and then I’ll invite a musician out. And each of these musicians – the one in Austin’s gonna be Jon Batiste – coming out to join me, they’re gonna play scores.

We’re going to have conversations about some of what these poems are about: faith, doubt, belief, and forgiveness, grace, these things. And then they’ll play music and score under my readings of poems. And we’ll do a sort of a playlist, a 12-poem playlist, and we’ll end the night. And that’ll hopefully be at least a story to tell and a good time spent.

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