Matthew McConaughey’s teenage son poured praise on him as the Oscar winning actor celebrated his 54th birthday over the weekend.
The Failure To Launch star’s 15-year-old son, Levi, took to his Instagram on Saturday to pay tribute to his father alongside a photo carousel of throwback snaps, which featured his mother, Camila Alves, and siblings, sister Vida, 13, and brother Livingston, 10.
He wrote alongside the post: “People know Matthew McConaughey as an actor and now a writer, but I know him as my father.
“The man who always makes time for us no matter what, the man who’s always there for us no matter what, and the man that taught me to appreciate the journey and not just the destination.”
“The journey’s just getting started… Happy birthday Papai.”
In one photo, the Dallas Buyer's Club star had his arms around his wife while their three kids posed in front of them.
Then in the second shot, Levi is all smiles alongside Matthew while they took in a baseball game at a stadium while the final photo sees the family around a kitchen table with their hands on top of one another’s.
Earlier this year, McConaughey opened up about the terrifying moment a plane he was travelling on unexpectedly dropped 4,000 feet.
The actor and his wife were flying from Austin, Texas to Frankfurt on March 1 when the plane was diverted to Washington DC, after severe turbulence injured seven people.
In the days after the incident, Brazilian model Alves shared a brief video on her Instagram which showed food, eating trays, shelves and other items littering the aisle due to the turbulence.
In a snippet from SiriusXM’s Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast with Kelly Ripa, the Oscar-winner revealed that he didn’t have his seatbelt on at that moment.
He said: “It’s suspended disbelief. I mean, it’s zero gravity. 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.
“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.”
McConaughey explained that he “reached over” to make sure that his wife was safe and revealed they were fortunately sat beside a pilot friend, who reassured them.
He continued: “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?’
“And [the pilot friend] 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?’ And he was like, ‘No problem.’ And I was like, ‘Great, love to hear that.’”
