Matthew McConaughey had a good reason for missing his 35th birthday party.
The Dallas Buyers Club star wrote about the experience in his new book, Poems & Prayers, which he detailed on the Wednesday (Dec. 10) episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!
“And this was right about the time when the old Mexican dirt weed that you would just kind of pull a toke off a joint, laugh, giggle, get the munchies, then maybe go hook up with somebody turned into a little hydroponic. A little stronger, right?” McConaughey told Kimmel around the eight-minute, 45-second mark of the episode below.
The actor said his friend offered him a toke for the road, which he smoked on the way to his 35th birthday party—but he couldn’t get out of the car as he had a powerful hit of marijuana.
“Because I decided that what was more important than going into my birthday was to sit in my truck and listen to Janet Jackson’s ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ 34 freaking times in a row and cry and think it was the most beautiful, wonderful song,” McConaughey said. “And I missed my birthday! [When] I finally went in, they all left.”
McConaughey turned 35 in 2004, two years after he briefly dated Jackson. The actor met his future wife, Camila Alves McConaughey in 2006, and the couple would marry six years later.
Per Us Weekly, the entertainer wrote in Poems & Prayers that being stuck during his 35th birthday party and listening to Jackson’s 1993 single on repeat led him to stop smoking.
“If every dance step matters too much, we never find our rhythm,” McConaughey wrote. “If we give every note too much credit, we’ll never hear the song. That’s why I quit smoking.”
Elsewhere in the interview, the Academy Award winner shared that he wrote his first poem at 18 and has been writing daily ever since. One of the poems in McConaughey’s book is about how couples “can’t engineer intimacy,” with the actor recommending that couples downsize king-sized mattresses to a queen size.
