Matthew McConaughey once exiled himself from Hollywood and lived as Mateo in Peru for 22 days without electricity. “I needed to get my feet on the ground. So I click out. Boom. Go to Peru. I needed to find it, to check the validation. I knew I had it, I just had to go prove it again. But I did question, now that I just got famous, I’ve got all this affiliation for this and that and the other, and I’m trying to decipher which part’s real, which part’s bullsh*t... I needed to meet people who knew me as Mateo. 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. It reaffirmed my own identity that, ‘Oh, I still got it. This is based on me.’” (via "No Magic Pill" podcast) variety.com/2026/film/news/m…