By Nick Bond

Copyright news

In the latest episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast, host Steven Bartlett asked McConaughey about his stint as an exchange student in Australia in 1988, when he was 18 years old.

McConaughey explained that he’d just finished high school as a “straight-A” student, and wanted to delay going to law school when his mother suggested a youth exchange program.

He was given two options, Sweden and Australia, and chose to head Down Under “because they speak English and Elle MacPherson’s there … 18-year-old thinking,” he said with a laugh.

McConaughey said he was told that he’d be living in Sydney but when he arrived, was packed off to live with a family in Warnervale, a town on the NSW central coast almost 100km north of Sydney.

“I remember pulling up that gravel driveway with that host family. They were like: ‘Welcome to Australia, mate’. I was like, ‘All right. Not what I thought. But I can make this work’.

But McConaughey said he struggled, particularly compared to the freedoms he’d recently gained back home: Suddenly he was hours from the city he thought he’d be exploring with no car, no girlfriend, no money and a strict 10pm curfew, even on weekends.

“I feel like I’m going backwards socially. No one’s got a car. Their interests seem to be different. The teachers … I’m failing. They’re giving me F’s in everything!”

On top of that, he said he had a “very awkward” relationship with his host family, made all the more strained when one night, they asked him to address them as “mum and pop.”

“That was a seminal moment because many things had happened up until that point that were odd that I was going, ‘okay, that’s just a cultural difference,” he recalled.

“[I’d think] Hey, stay open here. That’s a cultural difference. But I remember the night they said that, and it was the first time I went no, no, no, I’m not doing that.”

McConaughey says that around that time, his schoolwork was on such a downward slide that the principal politely steered him towards a work experience placement instead: “Let’s get you a job. You won’t get paid,” is how he recalls it.

The star worked in a variety of roles including as a bank teller for ANZ, and as an assistant at a barrister’s office. “I’m taking these odd jobs as a carpenter and all these different things.”

At home with his host family, life was positively monastic: Dinner at 5pm, then back to his room to read for the evening and write long letters to himself filled with “existential questions.” He adopted a vegetarian diet and ran 10km a day, dropped down to 60kg.

McConaughey said that after his difficult year in Australia was over, many people had the same question: Why on earth didn’t he come home early if he was so miserable? But the star said he felt he had to “honour” the agreement to last a year: “There was no way I was coming home,” he said.

But he said his tough experience in Australia taught him a valuable lesson about staying the course: “While I’m in Australia going inside out, imploding, I start to find a little power in the face that the harder this gets, the greater the reward there’s gonna be on the other side once I get outta here.”

McConaughey recently spoke about his time in Australia with Stellar Magazine – although, perhaps given he was speaking to an Aussie media outlet, he spared the gory details and instead spoke positively about what the experience taught him.

“I learnt a lot about myself and who I wanted to be,” he said. “Those are priceless memories and lessons I needed at that time in my life.”

He was less restrained in his 2021 memoir Greenlights, calling his time in Australia a “livin’ hell.”

“No one wanted to party and the chicks were not digging me,” he wrote of thr “torturous” experience.

McConaughey’s time Australia did indeed have a happy ending: He returned to the US, went to university, and soon catapulted into the world of acting: Just five years after that Aussie annus horribilis, his Hollywood career launched with a lead role in the 1993 cult classic comedy Dazed and Confused.