Matthew McConaughey was not wearing his seat belt when his Lufthansa flight crashed 4,000 feet in March.
The actor first discussed the incident on Entertainment Tonight while sneaking a peek at Kelly Ripa’s “Let’s Talk Camera” podcast on Tuesday.
“It was my tray table that held me,” the 53-year-old actor recalled. “I wasn’t wearing my seat belt and neither was the seat belt warning just before it happened.”
The Oscar-winning actress noted that her husband Camila Alves “reached out right away” to make sure she was wearing her seat belt.
“It’s a hell of a scare” left McConaughey feeling as if “there was no way he could control this situation at the moment”.
Instead, the “Interstellar” star and Alves, 41, “held hands.”
Other passengers had varying responses to the “suspension”. [in] “disbelief” at the moment of “zero gravity”.
“Some people were ghostly quiet,” he said. “Some people burst out laughing. And it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, that’s fun. It was like, ‘I’m in shock’.”
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“Your red wine, the glasses and plates with your food, are all suspended in the air, floating, still in the air… and then everything suddenly falls to the ground.”
McConaughey was seated by a friend and pilot who was “as calm as can be” and reassured the Golden Globe winner.
McConaughey said, “Steel bent… and ‘Can the plane lift this?’ I said,” he said. “And he said, ‘These are so tested that yes, don’t worry, the plane can structurally handle it.
The Dallas Buyers Club star continued, “‘If there’s a problem, can you fly this thing?’ I was saying.” “And it was like, ‘It’s okay. And I said, ‘Great, nice to hear that’.”
Noting that the flight attendants didn’t seem “extremely confident”, he described the incident as “the hairiest” he had ever experienced.
When news broke that the plane bound for Germany had made an emergency landing in Virginia in March, Alves told his Instagram followers that he and McConaughey were on the plane.
“I was told [the] the plane dropped almost 4000 feet,” the model wrote at the time. “Seven people went to the hospital. Everything was flying everywhere.
“The plane was KAOS and turbulence [kept] on the way … Thank God everyone was safe and well.”
He and McConaughey have been married since June 2012 and have three children – Levi, 14, Vida, 13, and Livingston, 10.