Despite his $200 million success, Matthew McConaughey spent a weekend in the desert reading 20 years of bad reviews—he says some of them had ‘a point’

Matthew McConaughey has an Oscar, an estimated $200 million net worth and a hefty catalog of 20 years’ worth of reviews—good and bad.

Despite his clear career success, he collated all the worst things ever written about him, went to the desert for a weekend, and read every one.

“I took them on as a thick book… not all the positive, the negative ones—and I sat with them,” McConaughey said in a recent interview with Build or Break .

“It’s all I took, and I spent two days looking at them, and it was hard.” And he learned from the tough experience that there are two kinds of critics—and only one is worth listening to.

“Some of the reviews, what I learned is that, from the very first sentence, this person has it out for me.

It didn’t matter if they saw the movie or not.

They just don’t like me.

They were going to write a negative review,” McConaughey explained.

Not every bad review was out to get him, though.

Some were still critical, but actually useful.

“I was like, ‘This person got a point.’ They’re actually a fan of mine, and they didn’t get from my performance what I was actually hoping they would’ve got.

Where did I fail in achievement?” That he says is constructive criticism.

“They were looking at the work and objectively criticizing it.

Applauded some things, but also applauded some things that shined a light on where I came up short.” His next question was simple: What can I learn from that? “Some are going to write bad about you or wish you the worst no matter what, because they just don’t like you from afar, don’t like your success or what have you,” he added.