Matthew McConaughey didn’t have his seatbelt on when the Lufthansa flight he was onboard dropped 4,000 feet in March.
The actor discussed the incident for the first time in Entertainment Tonight’s sneak peek of Kelly Ripa’s “Let’s Talk Off Camera” podcast on Tuesday.
“My tray table is what held me down,” the actor, 53, recalled. “I did not have my seatbelt on, and there was not a seatbelt warning right before it happened.”
The Oscar winner noted that he “immediately reached over” to make sure his wife, Camila Alves, had her seatbelt on.
The “hell of a scare” left McConaughey feeling like he had “no way to get control of this situation the moment.”
Instead, the “Interstellar” star and Alves, 41, “held hands.”
Other passengers had varied reactions to being “suspended [in] disbelief” during the “zero gravity” moment.
“Some people were ghost silent,” he said. “Some people had big bursts of laughter. And it was not like, ‘Oh, this is fun.’ It was like, ‘I’m in shock.'”
He explained, “Your red wine and the glass and the plates that your food was on are all suspended, floating, still just in the air … and then everything just comes crashing down.”
McConaughey was seated by a pal — and pilot — who was “calm as could be” and reassured the Golden Globe winner.
“The steel, it buckled … and I was like, ‘Can the plane hold that?'” McConaughey said. “And he was like, ‘These things are so tested, that yes, don’t worry, the plane structurally can hold that.’
“I was like, ‘If something’s wrong, can you fly this thing?'” the “Dallas Buyers Club” star continued. “And he was like, ‘No problem.’ And I was like, ‘Great, love to hear that.'”
He called the incident the “hairiest” he’s experienced “by far,” noting that the flight attendants didn’t look “extremely confident.”
When news broke in March of the Germany-bound flight’s emergency landing in Virginia, Alves told her Instagram followers that she and McConaughey were on the aircraft.
“I was told [the] plane dropped almost 4000 feet,” the model wrote at the time. “7 people went to the hospital. Everything was flying everywhere.
“The plane was a CHAOS and the turbulence [kept] on coming. … Thank God everyone was safe and ok.”
She and McConaughey have been married since June 2012 and share three children — Levi, 14, Vida, 13, and Livingston, 10.
