Matthew McConaugheyonce found himself tied up in a knotty situation.
The Oscar winner shared that years ago he was in a “major mess-up in Mexico,” but was able to diffuse the situation after name-droppingJennifer Lopezand his role alongside her inthe 2001 rom-comThe Wedding Planner.
“I pulled in one late night. I’m crossing the border, going way down south, and I get pulled over,” McConaughey recalled to hostJoshHorowitzon the Aug. 13 episode of theHappy Sad Confusedpodcast. “And it’s one of those pullovers where they noticed me. Gringo in the truck—nice truck. This is that dress down.”
The 56-year-old—who shares kidsLevi, 18,Vida, 16, andLivingston, 13, with wifeCamila Alves McConaughey—remembers preparing himself for quite the ordeal, adding, “I’m like, ‘Oh geez, get the wallet out. Here we go.’”
But as it “was going down,” McConaughey realized his star power might come in handy. He asked the officials pulling him over, “You guys know Jennifer Lopez? Ever seenWedding Planner?”
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He began pointing at himself as he tried to convey that he had starred alongside theSelenastar in the classic romcom. And thankfully, his idea worked as they quickly realized just who it was they were pulling over.
“They were like, ‘Ohhh,'” theInterstellaractor remembered. “They went off. We end up taking pictures together, and they let me go.”
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ButThe Wedding Plannerisn’t the only one of his films that has helped McConaughey in his everyday life as he revealed that his 2011 filmThe Lincoln Lawyeris “big in Cleveland,” quippingthat his time as Mickey Haller“got me out of a couple traffic tickets in Cleveland.”
As for another of his hits? As he revealed,“Saharaworks in Oregon with highway patrols.”
Host Horowitz was curious if his 2002 filmTiptoeshad ever come in handy, with McConaughey laughing, “Tiptoeshas yet to help me anywhere. But there’s a select few out there that if we come across, I’m sure I’ll get amnesty.”
For a deep dive into all the behind the secrets aboutThe Wedding Planner, keep reading.
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Ellis and Falk, a couple when they started writing the movie in 1995, were no longer romantic partners by the time the film got made, but they still saw it through together.
They agreed to her being Italian, however, and that’s supposed to be Mary’s background despite star Jennifer Lopez being of Puerto Rican descent.
Still, the switch caused a momentary crisis. “Adam drove to Matthew McConaughey’s house and begged for him to do it,” Ellis told <a href="https://comicvibe.com/d23-expo-2026-entertainment-showcase-every-disney-movie-tv-show-announcement-live-updates/” title=”D23 Expo 2026 Entertainment Showcase: Every Disney Movie & TV Show Announcement (Live Updates)”>Entertainment Weekly in 2017, “and he did.”
“They’re kinda hard to come by and hard to find, like good ones,” she told E! News ahead of The Wedding Planner’s Jan. 26, 2001, release (three days after her second album, J.Lo, dropped). “And when I read this one, I really liked it, so I was actively letting people know I wanted to do it.”
The then-31-year-old explained, “It’s hard to really find ones that are interesting and have some substance to them, but are still light and funny and romantic and touching.”
Though she was “not so much a workaholic or a control freak” like Mary, she told E!, “but more of a perfectionist.”
And she definitely understood how difficult it was to balance an all-consuming career with having a personal life.
But he also told E! News back in 2001 that it was after spending five minutes with Lopez that he really knew he wanted to do the film.
After consulting with Shankman at a Bennigan’s in Tucson, Ariz., he drove to Las Vegas to meet the singer-actress.
“There’s a pace to romantic comedy. In five minutes, we already had nicknames, [we’re] punching each other,” McConaughey said with a smile. “I can’t imagine doing a film like this and not liking my co-star, you know? That would really suck, to have to manufacture an attraction and a kindness.” (Asked if there was, in fact, anyone on set he hadn’t liked over the years, he assured, “All of my relationships have been different but good, and positive.”)
He had also just finished the “heavy duty responsibility, weight of the world on your shoulders, life and death” World War II-era action film U-571, and wanted something less weighty.
“This is affairs of the heart,” he said. “A nice change.”
“This one in particular I though was really great and organized—more like Mary than anybody else I had met—and she was very personalized with whatever she did,” the actress told E! News. “But she also told me, to be a good wedding planner you have to be almost like a psychiatrist, you know, to everybody around you. Just work out the problems and make people make up because there are a lot of fights.”
“I grew up in the Bronx, and we hardly ever had horses,” she told the Arizona Republic. “Actually, we never had any horses. It was a new thing for me. I had been on a horse once, but it was an old, old one and it barely moved. This time it was really hard. The pointing of your feet and the way you have to keep your knees…I thought it would just be like ‘Giddyup!’ Luckily, they had a stunt woman for the hard parts.”
As she also told E!, laughing, “It’s so much harder than you think it is. You think you just get on the horse and ride it, and the horse is just not having you, you know what I mean?”
McConaughey knew how to ride a horse—”if you’ve ridden before, you get back on it and after an hour or so, it’s like riding a bike,” he said—but he had to take lessons a few times a week for two months to prepare. “I like to dance, I have rhythm, but man, I do not know steps. I’m a very undisciplined dancer, and there’s a discipline to the tango…And then on the day when you shoot it, you hope you can relax enough to act and forget where your feet are going, and you hope like hell that your feet end up in the right place.”
And it was important to get all of it, the steps only being a fraction of it, just right. “That’s the foreplay,” McConaughey said, “that’s the love scene in the film, our dance.”
“The studio made a big mistake,” the director and choreographer, whose subsequent credits include A Walk to Remember, Hairspray and Rock of Ages, told the Arizona Republic. “They could have signed her a long time ago for much, much less. I told them, ‘Look, her album is going to come out and she’s going to be huge! You’re going to be screwed!’ They didn’t listen to me and sure enough, they were screwed! On the 6 came out and it was a whole new world.”
Lopez quipped, “The longer you wait, the more you’re going to pay!”
Insisting that was a joke, she added, “I worked just as hard back then as I do now. Money has nothing to do with it. It never did for me. I was always motivated by wanting to be an actress, wanting to sing and wanting to grow as an artist. Those were always and still are my motivating factors.”
“It was funny and we had fun going to work everyday, and there was a lot of laughter,” she told E! News, “so it was really nice. Everybody was really cool who was involved with the project, and we had a good time.”
Her last film was 2008’s Phantom Punch, so…what became of the actress who promised Billy that “no milk will ever be our milk”?
First she added the hyphenate to her name in 2000, marrying tennis champ Pete Sampras. After an early loss at the Australian Open, he was able to make it to The Wedding Planner premiere in 2001.
Sampras retired after winning the 2002 US Open, after which the super-private couple devoted their time to raising sons Christian, born Nov. 21, 2002, and Ryan, born July 29, 2005.
In the rarest of personal updates, Sampras shared in October 2023 that Wilson had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer the previous December.
“Since then, she has had major surgery, pushed through chemotherapy and continues with targeted maintenance therapy,” he said in a statement posted to the ATP Tour’s X account. “It is hard to watch someone you love go through a challenge like this. However, seeing our boys step up and be such strong supporters of Bridgette, myself and each other has been amazing. Watching Bridgette continue to be an incredible mom and wife through it all has been inspiring.”
Ellis told Entertainment Weekly in 2017, “At the time, we were eating a lot of M&M’s. Almost everything in the movie is [from our lives]. We were eating macaroni and cheese three times a day, and Massimo [Justin Chambers] does that in the movie. When I get full, I hike up my pant leg, and that’s one of Steve’s quirks that Fran complains about, so we really tried to pull as much as we could from what was going on with us at the time.”
Added Shankman, “When I read it, I remember laughing about it because I already knew other people who do it, so there was something about it that seemed like an easy, tropey cliché to me, but it made total sense because it was a real thing, and it deserved its place in the sun. I always thought it was weird, and when I read it in the script, I thought okay, that’s just crazy. [But the] moment is absurdly innocent.”
The director also said that he thought the movie’s most memorable line would be the one “where Jennifer says Matthew smells like grilled cheese sandwiches. That’s so romantic and so sweet, but I never thought that the M&M’s thing would ever stick.” (Personally, we would’ve guessed the most-quoted line was going to be “there it is, a limestone penis” from their stroll through the statue garden. But don’t mind us, we’re 12.)
And the woman knows her angles. “I mean, have we ever seen a bad shot of her?” the Oscar winner added. “Bam…She knows where [the camera] is and owns it, I really like that about her.”
Ellis told Entertainment Weekly in 2019 that he had originally envisioned a trilogy (and a whole TV series) and the next installment had Mary going full bridezilla as she and BFF Penny (consummate cinematic best friend Judy Greer) planned her and Steve’s wedding.
“The drama of it is she’s become exactly the kind of thing she hated, and she takes a step back and figures out what’s important to her,” Ellis explained.
Meanwhile, there would be some “grit” between Mary and Steve, who might realize “they weren’t looking at each other realistically” during the events of the first film. “There were some interesting romantic questions there.”
But what would a third movie entail? “We’d also batted around the idea that, during the planning of the wedding, Mary found out she’s pregnant… Which would lead to the third movie: Mary planning her daughter’s wedding!” Ellis shared. However, their idea was that Mary and Steve split up at some point but found their way back to each other while getting ready for their kid’s big day.
“The idea of what she’d want for her daughter and what her daughter wants would come into play, and whatever her journey was in the second movie, in the third movie she’d learn a lesson and try to teach her daughter what she’s learned and probably try to talk her out of the grand spectacle of it all because it doesn’t mean anything,” the British writer said. “What’s important is the person you’re going to be with, and she’d try to teach her daughter that lesson.”
Ugh, we’re so conflicted! While that could be a fun movie (and one that could be made right now, incidentally), is the thought of Steve and Mary divorcing something we even want to consider? Kinda defeats the purpose of the early-’00s rom-com.
