Matthew McConaughey’s mom lives with them: ‘her politics can be different than ours’
Embed from Getty Images
When we last checked in with the McConaughey family, they were funding a plane to bring emergency supplies to Maui and sharing more weird anecdotes about family matriarch Kay, who is known to be quite a, uh, character. I said at the time that I wondered if Camila’s story about the woman known as Ma Mac or Mama Kay was her lowkey way of getting a little overdue revenge. After learning that Kay lives with the McC family full-time, I stand by this theory. Ma Mac even works with Camila and argues politics with the rest of the fam.
Strictly speaking, Matthew McConaughey is a father of three. Ask the Oscar winner how many kids he and wife Camila Alves McConaughey have, however, and you’ll get a different response.
“We’ve got Levi (15), Vida (13) and Livingston (10) as our three children that Camila and I created and Camila bore,” he says in his trademark Texas drawl. “But we’ve got four children in the house — and one of ’em is 91. That’s Mama Kay. That’s my mom.”
For the past four years, McConaughey’s mother has been living with the Dazed and Confused star — who goes by “Papai,” the Portuguese word for “dad,” in a nod to Camila’s Brazilian roots — and his family. (“And I suppose she’s gonna be with us ’til she moves on from this life,” he muses.) The experience, he says, has been “really wonderful,” with Camila involving her mother-in-law in her work and online content. That’s helped the McConaughey matriarch feel “needed” and “in the game a little bit.” Her grandchildren, meanwhile, are getting a “wonderful, wonderful, wonderful lesson” about the importance of taking care of your elders.
“They’ve got their grandmother living in the house. And they’ve got their own relationships each with her; they have their own arguments each with her,” he says. “Her politics can be different than ours, and we all just discuss it and have it out loud. …. It’s fun.”
I searched around a little bit and as far as I could tell, McConaughey has never outwardly identified as a member of either party, although he did flirt with the idea of running for Texas governor a few years ago. He’s from Texas and has been rumored to lean Republican. He’s against vaccine mandates, but after the inexcusable tragedy in Uvalde, he was very vocal in support of gun control legislation. I don’t know if he’s referring to a difference in politics between his family and his mom, a threeway difference of opinions between each generation of McCs, or if they’re all Republicans and the McConaughey Five want gun control and peaceful transfers of power while Mama Kay has a 2nd Amendment tattoo and makes monthly donations to the Trump campaign. Maybe his kids campaigned for Beto and have brought MM and Camila to the good side. I don’t know. Since we do know MM’s politics on gun control, I’m going to run with that being one of the dinner table issues.
I’m a lone leftie in a big family and speaking from experience, if I’m arguing over whether or not America is going to continue to be a free-for-all, permitless hellscape which puts all of our lives, especially our children’s, in danger, I’m not fondly laughing about it. But that’s just me. Kudos to them if they find discussing politics in this day and age to be fun, I guess. They’re bigger people than I am.
