Matthew McConaughey appeared on the Armchair Expert podcast to chat with host Dax Shepherd about his experience with aging. Opening up about his previous fears, the actor revealed how he’s been able to overcome those feelings and is allowing himself to age naturally. Ultimately, he just wants to live a happy life.
McConaughey admits he once considered hair plugs
Now over 50, the Dazed and Confused (1993) actor has come to terms with the processes of aging naturally, but he’s still confused by it. “It seems to me this aging thing, right, it’s like, how do you do it gracefully but how do you deny it?,” he tells Shepherd. “And there are awkward ways to deny it, we’ve all seen it.”
McConaughey hasn’t been free from the anxieties of aging, admitting he once seriously thought about getting a hair transplant. It was back in the late 1990s, and as he explains, “I had a silver-dollar bald on top and I went, ‘Go gracefully, be all face.’ I remember going, wait a minute, I’m not ready to go quietly into the night on this. I considered hair plugs then I was like, nah, I don’t wanna do that, none of those look that good.”
Once he decided he wasn’t going to go through with a transplant after all, he researched other ways of encouraging hair growth. “So I found this topical treatment […] I started working on it topically, and son-of-a-[expletive], I have a better hairline now than I did in ’99. So, I still use it daily. I’m not going to quit and see if it’s all going to stick.”
McConaughey previously explained that he’d rub the treatment on his scalp for 10 minutes once a day. “I was fully committed to it. […] It was just manual labor,” he said.
McConaughey has struggled to keep up with his kids
His looks aren’t the only area that McConaughey’s been struggling with, in regard to the realities of aging. His physical body has also been showing signs of getting older, and he’s been having a harder time trying to keep up with his children.
McConaughey married his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey, in 2012, and the couple have since welcomed three children: Levi, Vida and Livingston. As they’ve been getting older, McConaughey wants to be sure he can still be there for them.
“I blew both my knees out a couple years ago,” he explains. “[Levi] was 12, good athlete, so obviously he’s beating me in sports, right? And so, I get surgery, they’re better, but I’m not back to where I was and he [is] still kind of beating me at a lot. But I chose to go, I’m not ready to accept that fact yet.”
Following the surgery, McConaughey committed himself to rehabilitating his knees, hoping to get them as close to the shape they were in before he damaged them. Now, he says, “At least I’m back to competing. [Levi is] better in some [sports], but I’m still whooping him in some. I wasn’t ready to concede.”
Developing new perspectives has kept him happy and healthy
Although aging can be stressful, McConaughey reveals other ways in which he’s brought peace and happiness into his life. Specifically, he’s changed his mindset when it comes to feelings of jealousy and envy.
“I don’t remember the last person I was jealous of. I am jealous of people with traits of what I’m chasing to get to, the man I’m trying to become,” he explains. “I’m jealous of people that don’t seem to need accomplishment and achievement as much as I do to feel significant […] I’ll have bouts of insignificance if I don’t get what I want, or pull off what I want, or maybe don’t feel I’m relevant in the right way. I get jealous of people that have the full belief in themselves, even in those times.”
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McConaughey admits that he still feels jealousy and envy, but it comes in the form of striving for a better way of thinking. He also says that good sleep helps tremendously with stress and he aims for nine-and-a-half hours every night.