Matthew McConaughey Reveals Terrifying Experience When His Flight Dropped 4,000 Feet

Matthew McConaughey is sharing his terrifying flight experience. The actor, 53, recalled the gut-wrenching moment the Lufthansa flight he and wife Camila Alves were on unexpectedly dropped 4,000 feet during Wednesday’s 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 of the moment. “Your red wine and the glass and the plates that your food was on are all suspended, floating, still just in the air. 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.” It was a “hell of a scare” the Oscar-winner admitted, especially as he had “no way to get control of this situation the moment.”

“My tray table is what held me down. I did not have my seatbelt on, and there was not a seatbelt warning right before it happened,” he recalled, adding that he “immediately reached over [and] made sure Camila had her seatbelt on.” The couple held hands while bracing for another drop before a second one did, which had both McConaughey and Alves in “shock.”

In addition to his wife, McConaughey was traveling with a friend whose expertise calmed his nerves. “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?’” he 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.”

“I was like, ‘If something’s wrong, can you fly this thing?’” McConaughey continued. “And he was like, ‘No problem.’ And I was like, ‘Great, love to hear that.’” The Dallas Buyers Club star’s friend might have had full confidence, but McConaughey himself didn’t shy away from admitting, “It was the scariest flight I’ve ever had by far.”