The Dallas Buyers Club star was smitten with Camila the first time he saw her in a Los Angeles nightclub in 2006, but it wasn’t exactly love at first sight for her.
“I’m healthily single at a club on Sunset Boulevard,” he told U.S. radio host Howard Stern on Tuesday (17Jan17). “I’m not even a club guy, but I was a club guy. And I’m making margaritas at the end of the table, and this figure moves across the room. And I remember (saying) to myself, ‘What is that?’
“She sits down, and I can’t get my eyes off her, and I’m waving, trying to get her (attention)… I go over and introduce myself.”
The 47-year-old invited Camila and her friends over to his table, but she decided to come by herself and Matthew proceeded to try to talk to the Brazilian model in her native language.
“Now we sit down, music’s playing,” he continued. “I make a margarita. That night I spoke 25 minutes of the best Spanish I’ve ever spoken in my life. She spoke Portuguese. I don’t think I ever understood Portuguese as well as I did that night. I was focused. It worked.”
Matthew then invited Camila back to his house to “extend his time” with her and he subsequently convinced her to spend the night in one of his guest bedrooms.
He tried to make advances, but she turned him down and wouldn’t even give him a kiss. The next morning he awoke to his future wife “holding court” with his buddies and housekeeper, eating breakfast “like they’d been buddies for 10 years”.
And he knew she was the one, but it would take work.
“That’s a woman who knows herself,” he said. “There (was) no walk of shame. She stayed over, and she knows who she is.”
Camila eventually gave into Matthew’s request for a proper date after turning him down three times. On their first date, the actor cooked for her and subsequently won her affections.
They wed in 2012 and have three children together.