Matthew McConaughey’s wife Camila Alves has spilled the beans on her relationship with her mother-in-law, Mary Kathlene McCabe.
The Brazilian model, 41, admitted in a candid new interview that things can get ”tricky” between the pair.
Alves said that McCabe, 91, who she and her husband affectionately call Ma Mac, used to call her the names of McConaughey’s exes when they first started dating and things once got so intense they fought it out while on a trip together.
Listen to the audio above.
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“She did all these things when I first came in the picture, right? She was really testing me. I mean, really testing me,” Alves said on Southern Living’s Biscuits and Jam podcast.
“She would call me by all of Matthew’s ex-girlfriends’ names, she would start speaking Spanish with me in a very broken way, kind of putting [me] down a bit. I mean, all kinds of stuff.”
Alves said she offered McCabe an olive branch at the start, giving her a free ticket to Istanbul where she was working.
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”About day three, I was taking her to her room, and she got into this whole other thing that it’s not my place to share, and she starts crying, and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ You know, ‘Ma Mac!’ and feeling so sorry. And as I put her to bed, I look at her and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh. She’s full of s–t.'”
“So I just [flipped] 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.”
”She just looked at me and she was like, ‘Okay. Now you’re in,”‘ Alves said.
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”All she wanted was for me to fight back.”
She finished by saying that the pair ”respect” one another and said: “It can get tricky sometimes but we always end with a good laugh and joke.”
In 2020, McConaughey revealed he was estranged from his mother for eight years, after she began leaking details about his life to the press.
“I would have conversations, and then all of a sudden – whoop – what we’d talked about would end up in the paper three days later. I was, like, ‘Mom, that was between us!’,” he said in an interview with The Howard Stern Show.
“I was calling my mom at that time, after I’d gotten famous, needing to talk to my mum,” he continued. “And my mum was not the only one on the phone. The woman that was on the phone was a fan ― of my fame.”
The How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days actor says he asked his mother to stop talking to the press, but she continued. The last straw was when she allowed a TV crew into her home for an interview, and pointed out the bed where he had lost his virginity.
When he confronted her about it, she denied doing anything wrong and conceded that she just assumed he’d never find out about it.
“We went through a time where I didn’t really share much with her,” he said. “She became a different person.”
“It was a strenuous relationship for eight years. We’re back completely now,” the actor added, saying that he’s since “forgiven her” and had to “make some boundaries”.