Matthew McConaughey revealed the details of his horrifying Lufthansa flight and described the moment his plane dropped 4,000 feet.
McConaughey’s full interview about the experience airs on the April 12 episode of SiriusXM’s “Let’s Talk Off Camera” podcast with Kelly Ripa.
“It’s suspended disbelief. I mean, it’s zero gravity,” he explained in a sneak peek interview posted by Entertainment Tonight. “Your red wine and the glass and the plates that your food was on are all suspended, floating, still just in the air,” McConaughey said. “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.”
Matthew McConaughey is opening up about the Lufthansa flight he was on that unexpectedly dropped 4,000 feet.https://t.co/hQo21273Ww
— Entertainment Tonight (@etnow) April 11, 2023
McConaughey was on the plane with his wife, Camila Alves, and described the experience by saying it was “a hell of a scare.”
The famous actor said he was scared at the realization that he had “no way to get control of this situation.”
“My tray table is what held me down,” he said, according to ET. “I did not have my seatbelt on, and there was not a seatbelt warning right before it happened.” He said he “immediately reached over, made sure Camila had her seatbelt on,” according to ET.
McConaughey spoke of the sinking feeling of doubt and confusion that intermingled with the fear of having no control of his fate.
“[We] held hands just saying, ‘OK, is that it? Is there another one coming?’” he said.
McConaughey and Alves happened to be traveling with a friend that was 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?’” McConaughey said.
“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,” the actor said, according to ET. (RELATED: 11 People Seriously Injured On Turbulent Hawaiian Airlines Flight)
“I was like, ‘If something’s wrong, can you fly this thing?’” McConaughey said. “And he was like, ‘No problem.’ And I was like, ‘Great, love to hear that.’”
The actor summed up his experience by saying, “it was the hairiest flight I’ve ever had by far.”