Camila Alves Reveals Rocky Start to Relationship With Matthew McConaughey’s Mother

Camila Alves had to fight for the approval of Matthew McConaughey’s mom. The model, who tied the knot with the Oscar winner in 2012, revealed on Tuesday’s episode of Southern Living’s Biscuits & Jam podcast that her mother-in-law, Mary McCabe, really put her through the wringer before accepting her as a part of the family.

“She did all these things when I first came in the picture, right? She was really testing me. …I mean, really testing me,” said the Brazilian model, who shares three kids with McConaughey – Levi, 14, Vida, 13, and Livingston, 10. “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.”

Eventually, Alves said she was able to win over the Interstellar star’s mom with a little bit of pushback during a work trip to Istanbul. “The whole way there, the whole plane ride to Istanbul, she was telling me all these stories and putting all these things in my head,” Alves recalled. On day three of the trip, however, Alves realized McCabe was “full of s-.”

“So I just flip it on her and brought my spicy Brazilian, Latin side, and I let her have it,” she admitted. “So I went back at her, and we had it back and forth, back and forth. And then at the end, she just looked at me and she was like, ‘OK. Now you’re in.’” Looking back, the designer said she can now tell that her future mother-in-law wanted her to “fight back” against her treatment. 

“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,” she gushed. And while they can sometimes have “tricky” moments in their relationships, they can always figure it out with a “good laugh and a joke.”

It’s good that Alves grew to love her husband’s mother, because she explained on the podcast that he’s actually a lot more like her than he is the Dazed and Confused kind of character people might see him as. “When we first start dating, it was this image of Matthew of getting high, laid back, no shirt, whatever,” she recalled. “Which I’m like, ‘The guy doesn’t even smoke. What is this vision coming from?’” Alves continued, “He’s actually the opposite, and he’s like his mom. She’s very organized, very minimalistic, very on time, very prepared, and he gets a lot of those traits from her.”