Matthew McConaughey recently revealed his mom’s method of testing his now-wife while appearing on Jana Kramer’s “Whine Down” podcast. The actor shared that his mother called his wife, Camila, by an ex-girlfriend’s name at the beginning of their relationship to see how she would handle it. “My family – and part of Camila and I as well – we cherish the value of a sense of humor and comedy,” said McConaughey. “Some people were like, ‘Oh, my gosh,’ but… Camila wasn’t wounded about it,” he insisted. “What tickles us may bruise others.” The actor claimed that his mother, Mary McCabe, was just looking out for him at the beginning of their relationship. “She tested my feelings and tested the woman I had the feelings for,” he said. “Big picture, that’s pretty cool actually.”
Camila has previously shared how McCabe calling her an ex-girlfriend’s name “really tested” her. She also spoke about a time where she took McConaughey’s mother on a business trip to Istanbul, revealing that the two got into an argument. “So I just flip it on her and brought my spicy Brazilian, Latin side, and I let her have it. So I went back at her, and we had it back and forth, back and forth,” Camila recalled during an episode of Southern Living’s “Biscuits & Jam” podcast. “And then at the end, she just looked at me and she was like, ‘OK. Now you’re in.'” She continued, “All she wanted was for me to fight back. And then from that day on, that night on, we have the most amazing relationship, and I have so much respect for her. She has so much respect for me. I mean, it can get tricky sometimes, you know? But we always end with a good laugh and a joke.”
The pair began dating in 2006 and tied the knot in 2012. They share three children together: Levi, Vida and Livingston. When Matthew and Camila got married in 2012, they made the move from Malibu to Texas, where McConaughey is from. “And when I moved to Texas, the first thing that I noticed was how the sense of community was so present, and how their sense of, ‘We got you, and we gonna take care of each other,’ was really present,” Camila told the Southern Living podcast. “People really stood by what they said they were gonna do. So if they said they were gonna show up, they were gonna show up. They didn’t over promise and under deliver. The values there, you know – family, religion, sports, food, culture – was really, really present. So we moved to Texas. It wasn’t really planned, and I got there, and I immediately felt at home. It took me right back to my roots in a way.”