Matthew McConaughey may not be an action movie hero like Tom Cruise, but if you needed him to save you in real life, he could pull off a "mission impossible" too.
McConaughey recently appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and while playing a game of "True Confession" with the host and MC Black Thought of The Roots, he shared a wild but amazing story about a time he saved his six-month-old baby from a charging mountain ram.
The objective of the game is that each player has to write a story that may or may not be true, then read it out loud. The rest of the table has to guess if the tale is true or false.
"I got charged by a mountain ram at the edge of the Grand Canyon and had to throw my 6-month-old child 15 feet through the air "” to my wife "” to save him," McConaughey shared.
Black Thought was convinced that the Oscar winner's story was fabricated, but after attempts to confuse them, the buzzer went off and McConaughey confirmed that Fallon's suspicions that the story was true, even the "15 feet through the air" bit.
The 48-year-old then went into more details about the incident, revealing that he and his wife, Camila Alves, were on a picnic with their son, Levi (now 10 years old), when a ram appeared out of nowhere and began to threaten their safety.
The True Detective star was also with his dog, whose incessant barking agitated the ram even more. McConaughey went into full parent mode and immediately tried to find a way to protect his child. That's when he got the idea to throw the baby at this wife, who managed to make it down the hill already.
Now that his family was safe, it was the patriarch's turn to escape the wrath of the beast.
"I grabbed this little branch and I get behind it and it's this cherry bush and it's about as big as my pinky and I'm like, "˜This is not gonna save me at all,'" McConaughey recalled. "I squared off and just tried to go as Yoda as I could with this ram and just say, 'Not me, whatever it is,' and he was kicking dirt and everything."
McConaughey finally managed to scare off the ram, but it wasn't until after the incident that he realized why the animal acted so irrationally.
"We were between him and all his ladies and he didn't want any other male scent on his mountain," he explained. "I was like, 'Your mountain, sir'."
Although it was scary at the time, the McConaugheys, which now includes daughter Vida, 8, and son Livingston, 5, can now look back and laugh about the encounter.
Thanks to Fallon's "True Confessions" segment, we can laugh with them too.