Matthew McConaughey is opening up about the weekend he spent in the desert reading 20 years’ worth of criticism of his work.
The Oscar winner explained it during Tuesday’s episode of the “Build or Break” podcast after host Daniel Lubetzky asked how he keeps poor feedback about his performances from negatively impacting his self-worth.
McConaughey joked that “the ones who wrote the good reviews were the smart ones” before revealing that he once gathered 20 years of negative reviews in a “big thick book” and “went away to the desert for a weekend” to examine them all.
“I read every one. All the negative reviews … and I sat with them,” he told Lubetzky. “I spent two days with them, and it was hard.”
According to McConaughey, some of the reviews were clear “from the very first sentence, ‘Oh, this person has it out for me.’ It didn’t matter whether they saw the movie or not. They just don’t like me. They were going to write a negative review.”
On the other hand, the actor said, other writers were obviously dishing out fair and objective criticism. This led him to consider what he could learn from them.
“I was like, ‘This person’s got a point. They’re actually a fan of mine, and they didn’t get from my performance what I was actually kinda hoping they would have got. Where did I fail in the choice?’ Because this is constructive criticism,” he continued.
McConaughey has starred in countless hit films and TV shows, including 2013’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” and 2014’s “Interstellar,” since his breakout role in 1993’s “Dazed and Confused.”
He said he learned during his decades-long acting career that it’s best not to be “falsely filled up” with the opinions of others and to instead “just take it in grace and move and dance through [it].”
“That’s part of the role that can come with success. Handle that gracefully,” he added.
Watch McConaughey’s interview below.