'It was the hairiest flight I've ever had by far,' he says.
Matthew McConaughey is opening up about a terrifying experience. In an exclusive sneak peek of the April 12 episode of SiriusXM's Let's Talk Off Camera podcast with Kelly Ripa, the 53-year-old actor gets candid about the Lufthansa flight he and wife Camila Alves were on that unexpectedly dropped 4,000 feet.
"It's suspended disbelief. I mean, it's zero gravity," he explains. "Your red wine and the glass and the plates that your food was on are all suspended, floating, still just in the air. And to look at it for that long, which wasn't that long -- one, two, three, four [seconds] -- and then everything just comes crashing down."
McConaughey calls the experience "a hell of a scare," noting he felt "a 100 percent feeling" of knowing you "have no way to get control of this situation the moment."
"My tray table is what held me down. I did not have my seatbelt on, and there was not a seatbelt warning right before it happened," he recalls, adding that, after the fact, he "immediately reached over, made sure Camila had her seatbelt on."
"[We] held hands just saying, 'OK, is that it? Is there another one coming?' Another one did come," she says. "It was odd. You hear people's reactions. Some people were ghost silent. Some people had big bursts of laughter.
Along with Alves, McConaughey was traveling with his friend, who happens to be a pilot.
"As a person who's not a pilot, my mind goes to the actual engineering of the plane. The steel, it buckled. And you go, 'How can something withstand that?'" he says. "I happened to have a friend of mine sitting next to me who was a pilot. And he was calm as could be. I was like, 'Can the plane hold that?' And he was like, 'These things are so tested, that yes, don't worry, the plane structurally can hold that.' That was a big relief."
"I was like, 'If something's wrong, can you fly this thing?'" McConaughey adds. "And he was like, 'No problem.' And I was like, 'Great, love to hear that.'"
While McConaughey's pilot pal was confident, the same can't be said for the flight attendants.
New episodes of SiriusXM's Let's Talk Off Camera debut Wednesdays on Stitcher, the SXM App and all major podcast listening platforms.
As for McConaughey, he's promoting his Art of Livin event, a free virtual seminar featuring motivational speakers and other inspiring people.
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