Matthew McConaughey once carried an unusual book into the West Texas desert, 20 years of bad reviews of his own work.
The actor, 56, recalled the trip during the Oct. 13 episode of Build or Break, hosted by Daniel Lubetzky.
His team placed the trip near Marfa while he was writing Greenlights, Fortune reported.
Lubetzky had asked how he keeps criticism of his acting from affecting his self-worth. McConaughey acknowledged that the reviews do get to him.
Some Reviews Made Him Question His Own Choices
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McConaughey spent two days reading the collection without turning to positive notices for relief. “It was hard,” he said. Some reviews seemed personal from the opening sentence, convincing him that those writers would have disliked his work regardless of what appeared on screen.
Other negative notices came from writers he believed were fans of his work. Their objections concerned a particular performance. “This person’s got a point,” he recalled thinking, according to PEOPLE. He considered whether his choices had failed to communicate what he intended.
Hollywood’s Praise Made Him Suspicious, Too
Before becoming a movie star, McConaughey said, the approval or criticism he received generally depended on how well he had done a job. A successful opening weekend brought a different experience, people arriving with champagne and declarations of affection when he could barely remember their names.
He wondered how much of that enthusiasm would survive a flop. Hearing strangers say they loved him was especially jarring because he reserved those words for very few people in his own life.
Early in his career, he sometimes challenged that sudden affection. He later learned to accept it politely without letting it inflate his sense of himself.
In a 2020 interview with GQ, he said he examined favorable reviews, too, asking whether the praise reflected what he had actually set out to achieve. “They don’t steer my ship,” he said of critics, while acknowledging that a well-written positive review felt better than a negative one.
He Walked Away From Roles He Knew He Could Do
McConaughey also discussed leaving romantic comedies on Build or Break. Films such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days had established him as a romantic lead, but scripts began to feel too familiar. He wanted work that required preparation and left him uncertain about how he would pull it off.
In a separate September 2025 interview on The Diary of a CEO, he described rejecting an action-comedy offer that rose from $8 million to $14.5 million. The final figure persuaded him to reread the script, but he still declined, PEOPLE reported.
He spent roughly 20 months away from acting before the roles he wanted began arriving. The subsequent run included The Lincoln Lawyer, True Detective and his Oscar-winning performance in Dallas Buyers Club.
The 36-Year Habit Behind McConaughey’s Greenlights
McConaughey’s material for Greenlights included 36 years of journals. In a March 2021 interview with Indulge, he explained that he had begun writing as a teenager, recording questions about relationships and growing up.
He also wrote about going to movies and noticing when his reactions differed from those of everyone around him. A moment might make him laugh while the rest of the theater stayed quiet, or an audience-wide joke might leave him unmoved.
The records weren’t confined to notebooks. He kept bags of napkins, beer coasters and the insides of matchboxes. When he had nothing else to write on, he sometimes used his arm and photographed the words.