Why Matthew McConaughey Moved to Peru

That is a strange problem, if also a highly specific one. Most people do not need to flee international recognition to recover the thrill of being asked basic questions. McConaughey apparently did.

So he went to Peru for 22 days and stepped outside the identity that Hollywood had begun building around him.

The people he met knew him as “Mateo”

In Peru, McConaughey said, he was not treated as a movie star because the people around him did not know him that way. Instead, they knew him as Mateo.

“I needed to meet people who knew me as Mateo. That was it,” the Dallas Buyers Club actor explained.

By the end of the trip, he said the relationships he had formed felt emotionally clean, unfiltered by status or career momentum.

“And at the end of 22 days, the tears in their eyes and the tears in my eyes and the hugs we had on the sadness and happiness of saying goodbye were all based off of the man they met named Mateo, who had nothing to do with the celebrity and the experience and times we had together for 22 days.”

The point, for him, was not disappearing forever. It was finding out whether he could still recognize himself without the applause attached.

How the trip changed his sense of self

McConaughey said the time away from Hollywood helped him recover a steadier sense of identity. Once the escape stopped feeling like a temporary hideout and started feeling like a life he could actually choose, he realized he was ready to return.

“I was now at the place long enough to go, ‘I could live this. This could be my existence,’” he said. “As soon as you go, ‘I could do this,’ then you’re like, ‘Well, I can return home.’”

He added that the trip “gave me self-identity again.”

“It reaffirmed my own identity that, ‘Oh, I got it. This is based on me,’” he said.

McConaughey later made a more lasting move away from Los Angeles. He and his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey, eventually chose to raise their children in his native Texas rather than remain in Hollywood full-time. The couple share Levi, 17, Vida, 15, and Livingston, 13.

For McConaughey, the Peru chapter was brief. But from the way he describes it, those 22 days gave him something celebrity could not: a room full of people saying goodbye to Mateo, not the star of the moment.