Dude!

With an $8 million-per-film payday, a smokin’ Brazilian girlfriend, a baby boy named Levi, and throngs of adoring fans, Matthew McConaughey is ready to take on his biggest challenge yet: how to build a better flip-flop.

by John Spong

October 2008

Matthew McConaughey was bouncing on his toes, waving one hand above his head, and laughing with great zeal and abandon. Shocking, I know. Five feet away stood two comely young women, utterly charmed and giggling along with him. Another weird twist.

A few more details: They were assembled in the reception area of the Venice Beach office of McConaughey’s production company, j. k. livin, the space recently redone to befit an actor who reportedly makes $8 million per film. With dark hardwood floors and exposed brick, the glassed-in offices looked down on an open lobby. The walls held framed script pages and large posters from McConaughey’s favorite movies—Dino De Laurentiis’s King Kong, S. R. Bindler’s Hands on a Hard Body, his own Sahara. A twenty-foot-tall screen on one side of the room showed a Cubs game.

Outside on the famous Venice Beach boardwalk, the daily circus boogied in high gear. Homeless guys squatting in front of toe-ring shops flirted with bikini girls on skateboards, begging for money specifically for pot. The craftsmen who’ll carve your name on a grain of rice yelled to be heard over deejays scratching old vinyl records and a guy playing Tom Waits songs on an upright piano parked on the edge of the sidewalk. There were professional sand-castle builders, break-dancers, jugglers, and drunks, not one of them eliciting so much as a “Honey, look at that man” from the tourists who’d come in search of exactly that scene. The tourists, by the way, were identifiable by the fact that they wore socks.

Inside, McConaughey had just shown up for work, at three o’clock sharp. The first order of business was for the two young women, j. k. livin employees Leslie and Diana, to show him a metal contraption shaped like half a cantaloupe. It had a handprint on top, and Leslie said it was a lie detector. Ever game, McConaughey took it for a test-drive. He put one of his oversized hands on the machine and said, “My name is Matthew.” Nothing. He looked up at Diana, cocked his head, and grinned. Then the machine sent a sharp jolt of electrical current through him that had him hopping around the room. So begin workdays at j. k. livin.

Oh, and his office attire? Flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a T-shirt, that last tidbit being one that might actually surprise a few people.

It was a Wednesday in mid-July, and the world of j. k. livin was particularly cheery. New son Levi had just turned 2 weeks old, and the 38-year-old McConaughey still wore a hospital admission bracelet on his left wrist. OK! magazine had paid $3 million for the exclusive first photos of son, father, and mother, Brazilian model Camila Alves. The pictures had hit the Internet that morning, and all the money went to his nonprofit, the j. k. livin foundation. But more immediately gratifying, the day was relatively paparazzi-free. The Discovery Channel, as he refers to the tabloid photographers who hound him, was on hiatus. “There’ve been, like, six cars camped outside my house for the past three weeks waiting to get that first shot of the baby,” he said as he settled down. “But this morning, after these came out on the information superhighway, there was nobody outside. We busted the bubble.”

The movie business was booming too. Entrenched as Hollywood’s favorite male lead in romantic comedies, he was now bringing in enough money to help fund his own films, and his nine-person staff was finishing preparations for the September premiere of the first such project, Surfer, Dude, back in Austin. That extra cash (and cachet) had also enabled him to get going in earnest on a long-considered project: a lifestyle brand built on his personal philosophy, called—you guessed it—j. k. livin.

The brand and philosophy were our topics for the day, and on the climb up the stairwell to his office, he assumed the role of tastemaker and empire builder. And what does that look like? In a small, sunlit room with just a coffee table and four low-slung leather chairs, he sat down, politely crossed his legs like the corporate titans do . . . and opened a cold beer.

“A flip-flop,” he began, “has gotta be malleable and form to your feet. But it can’t be too thick. Too much cushion takes away the beauty of the flip-flop. The whole point is that it’s not a shoe.

“No headbands. It’s got to be a bandanna. So you can mix it up. Sometimes I like to roll it thin, do like an Indian thing with it. Other times I wear it wider, or even flat on my head like a do-rag, Geronimo- or Tupac-style, with that ‘j. k. livin’ logo showing across the front.”

He moved quickly from the product to the path. His buddy Lance Armstrong refers to him as a “redneck Buddha,” presumably because of ruminations like these. “We can talk about j. k. livin a lot of different ways. It’s a decision-making paradigm, not a rule book. It has structure, but it doesn’t put life in a box. It’s not all aphorisms. You take your own counsel with yourself on what it is. It’s a lyric, a philosophy, a bumper sticker. It’s a rap, a rhythm, a bass line. It’s not about treble, ’cause we got a lot of that out there. Let’s keep to our bass line.”

He sounded equal parts shaman and salesman, exactly the way he does when he goes on talk shows to promote new films, pronouncing ideas of varying depths that are plainly well mulled. The shouts of bums quarreling outside floated through a window, but McConaughey was oblivious. He’d scoot to the edge of his chair and slap the table for emphasis or give a quick whistle. Lots of gesticulating and a periodic stroll around the room.

“It’s a ‘conservative early, liberal late’ approach. First you determine your weather. For me that’s making sure that I’m working with friends. That way I don’t have to watch my back. They’re not going to lie to me, not going to steal. So I may get rained on, and I may get sunburned. But I won’t get earthquaked or tsunamied. Next you choose your direction: east, west, north, or south. That’s ‘conservative early.’

“Once you do that, that eight-lane autobahn opens up to you. That’s the ‘liberal late.’ You can swerve all over those eight lanes. Each lane may be a different decision you make. You can choose to exit. You can stop for gas and decide to stay for a couple weeks. You know where you’re going and that eventually you’ll get there. You can relax. No sweat, because you’re headed in the right direction.”

He talked increasingly faster, getting ahead of himself as he lit on new reference points. Only occasionally did he slow to connect the dots, but when he did, it was helpful. “No one wants to eat their broccoli, right? I’m not saying j. k. livin is broccoli. But it is good for you. I’m not selling you straight candy canes, because then your teeth are gonna fall out. So live right. Take care of yourself. And if you have a completely different opinion of what that means from me, the only way j. k. livin can disagree is if you’re harming yourself or others. Other than that, it’s your call.”

None of it seemed even slightly out of character, but by the time he got back to business, he’d quite possibly tired himself out. He leaned back in his chair and, for a moment, sounded summarily, surprisingly grounded.

“I’m starting this brand because it accents a positive. It spreads a good word, puts a smile on my face. And then, down to a real simple, fun thing, man: I think it’s cool.”

The authorities are split on Matthew McConaughey, not in their perceptions but in their reactions. Everybody sees the same fun-loving free spirit, impossibly handsome and charming. The cynical read is that he skates on those qualities, that he’s more interested in finding his way to the tailgate party than the Oscar podium. But a fan will wonder who wouldn’t want to go to that party and how anyone could find fault with the M&M’s scene in The Wedding Planner. The views aren’t really that different, but their by-products are. He is a gossip-blog punch line and a box office monster. If he merely marched to the beat of his own drum, he might gain wider respect. But he insists on dancing, sometimes after imbibing. And he looks as if he likes it. That he doesn’t give a flip about the way people see him only adds fuel to both camps.

I’ll confess up front to taking him more seriously than most folks I know. I trace it to an interview I did with him five years ago, for a story on the making of Dazed and Confused. We were sitting in the backyard of a Hollywood mansion he’d just bought and remodeled, by a pool that gave way to a mammoth view of the Hollywood Hills, and he rambled gleefully about Dazed for two full hours. The film had given birth to his career and made all that splendor possible.

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