Matthew And Camila Alves McConaughey On Family Traditions, Their Love For West Texas, And The Perfect Tequila Drink

Matthew McConaughey has a theory. Actually Matthew McConaughey has lots of theories, about everything from how your drinking water quality affects your hairline to the way knowing the truth, seeing the truth, and telling the truth are all very different experiences.

But one theory that's special to him goes like this: The closer we get to the site of our conception, the more wholly ourselves we are. Not birthplace, mind you—conception. To be “full-blown shaking hands with where you were conceived,” he explains, is to be hooked into your original essence. He’s even thought about running experiments to test this. “Wouldn’t it be interesting to take people back to where they were conceived and have them spend a month?” he says. “And then you could ask: How is your life? How are your thoughts? How is your creativity? How do you feel?” If Matthew is feeling good on this sunny Texas day—and that trademark grin of his keeps suggesting it—the reason might be just that: As he speaks, he’s roughly 2 miles from Fort Davis, where, in early 1969, Kay and Jim McConaughey conceived him. For Matthew, this is literal ground zero.

Not that there aren’t other reasons for him to be feeling good. Camila Alves McConaughey, his Brazilian-born wife of 12 years who’s an entrepreneur, author, and founder of the lifestyle website Women of Today, is beside him for their first-ever Southern Living cover shoot. The couple has just embarked upon a journey to market their own brand of tequila, which they’ve named Pantalones, so they’ve got margaritas on their work to-do list. To answer Matthew’s questions, then: Life? Life is good. Thoughts? Firing right and left. Creativity? Flowing. Feelings? “I get here, and even my metabolism flies,” he says. “Here,” for the record, is the tiny town of Marfa, once a desolate ranching outpost in the high Chihuahuan Desert but now a funky-chic haven for artists, celebrities, and other jet-setters. It’s a place he visits often to recharge, reflect, rejuvenate.

Home Field Advantage

But Matthew’s “here” might just as easily be applied to all of Texas. Since the McConaugheys sold their home in California to go full-time in the Lone Star State in 2014, the actor has become one of its most ardent champions, a tireless ambassador for a chill vision of Texas.

That’s him on the sidelines at The University of Texas at Austin football games, amid all those burnt orange-and-white uniforms, high-fiving and hooking horns. (He also teaches a film course at the school, his alma mater.) That’s Matthew narrating the 2022 documentary Deep in the Heart, a celebration of the state’s wildlife, and teaming up with country music icon George Strait in a recent “Don’t Mess With Texas” anti-litter commercial. And that was him briefly floating the idea of running for governor. Texas isn’t just in his blood; it can seem, at times, to be his blood.

Before Matthew started boosting that vision of his home to the world, however, he needed Camila to see it. “We were living a happy life in Malibu,” says Camila, who met her husband in 2006 in a West Hollywood nightclub—where he was shaking margaritas, appropriately enough. “We had a beautiful house that we’d built together and put a lot of love and care into. We were raising our kids there. I was growing everything in the yard. I had bees making honey.”

In other words, they were putting down roots with their three children. But she recognized that Matthew was anchored to older, thicker roots. When a family crisis occurred, the McConaugheys decamped to Austin to help his mother and two brothers. During their several-week stay, Camila noticed something different about Matthew. The word she tends to reach for when describing the effect of Texas on her husband (and later on herself) is “gravity.” She’ll say, “The gravity is very different in Texas.” It’s lighter, gentler, freer. She noticed it easing her husband’s steps, buoying his moods, widening that grin.

Home field advantage is a real, quantifiable phenomenon in sports. For various psychological reasons, athletes perform better on their own turf. Maybe there’s a corollary there for the rest of us—or at least for Matthew.

Camila, for her part, thought she was seeing it.

Early one evening, as they were driving back from visiting Matthew’s mother, they found themselves stopped at a red light.

He was behind the wheel, taking in the Hill Country panorama with what she describes as “a peaceful but confident, energetic look” on his face.

He recalls that, out of nowhere, his wife blurted out a question:“You want to move here, don’t you?”

There’s a ripple of marital laughter, 12 years later, as they remember that stoplight moment.

“It was like one...two...three...,”she says, eyeing him, “and you went, ‘Yep.’ ”

Matthew replies, “And you went—”

Camila says, “ ‘You son of a b....’ ”

A giant burst of laughter ensues.

“As soon as I chuckled, the light turned green and we pulled out,” Matthew says.

“And then I said, ‘Let’s do it,’ ” she remembers.

“That’s true,” he says, smiling at her. “ ‘Let’s do it.’ ”

So they did.

Matthew readily admits that the Malibu-to-Texas transition was harder for Camila than it was for him. The only places in America she had ever lived were New York and Los Angeles, the glamour nexus. Matthew had friends and family in Texas; she didn’t. He was familiar with all the landscapes (physical, cultural, and otherwise); Camila wasn’t—until she found, to her surprise, that she was.

Raising Their Spirits

Camila Alves was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Her mother was an artist, and her father was a farmer and rancher. Although she spent some of her childhood in a city, the rest of the time was in the country, specifically the small town of Itambacuri in the state of Minas Gerais. She was startled by how many aspects of Texas life reminded her of her own upbringing in Brazil, things like traditions, values, and manners.

“We grew up saying ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, sir’ or—as I should say—‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘Yes, sir,’ ” she recalls. “It takes me right back to how I was raised.”

Her new home, as it turned out, echoed her first one. Time may not be a flat circle—as Matthew’s True Detective character, Rust Cohle, was fond of saying—but it can repeat itself.

“In Texas,” says Camila, “we were going to the church that we like to attend every Sunday. Sports became a stronger tradition for the kids—”

“Ritual!” Matthew interjects. “Ritual came back, whether that was Sunday church, sports, dinner together as a family every night, or staying up after that telling stories in the kitchen, sitting at the island pouring drinks and nibbling while retelling them all in different ways than we told them before.”

At another kitchen island, this one outdoors by a grill at the Marfa-area ranch where Matthew sometimes stays, it’s also drink-pouring time. Before finally settling on the formula for their Pantalones tequila, the couple went through 47 versions.

Aside from working together on their nonprofit, the just keep livin Foundation (which they started in 2008 to help at-risk youth), this is their first joint venture. “No one’s ever seen how she works with me,” Matthew says. “It’s never been out there. It’s always been in the house behind closed doors. So this is the first time we’re doing it out front.”

Both McConaugheys favor the reposado tequila, gold-colored from nine months of aging in oak barrels, poured over a few chunks of ice. With an evening redness blossoming on the horizon in the west, Matthew raises a glass to the giant Texas sky—perhaps a toast, or maybe a salute, but a ritual for sure.

A mile here in Texas feels like a mile, he says. An hour feels like 60 minutes. That’s what he and Camila realized once they’d settled here, once they’d learned, together, to call it home. “Time slowed down,” Matthew says. “The clock was right, the body clock. And part of that is ritual; part of that is just the distance between places and the way people move. But it’s also the hospitality, the courtesy, the common sense, the lack of drama.”

Camila, however, has a theory of her own. “The gravity,” she says. “The gravity is right.”

Toasting A New Tequila

Matthew and Camila were excited to bring the fun back to tequila when they launched their Pantalones brand last fall. But when it came to developing their formula, the couple was serious about not stopping until they both agreed it was just right. “When we tasted iteration number 47, we both immediately knew it was the one,” says Camila. Pantalones is produced in Mexico at Tequilera TAP, a 100% USDA-certified organic distillery, in Amatitán, Jalisco. Their partners are fourth -generation agave growers and second-generation tequila producers. Order online at pantelonestequila.com, or visit a Total Wine & More store in your area.
From left: Tequila Añejo, $55; Tequila Reposado, $50; Tequila Blanco, $45