“A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey” reached 8.35 million worldwide on all platforms. Some 5.13 million people in the United States interacted with content from the exclusive interview, while the remaining 3.22 million were international.
On CNN, the interview — which aired on Feb. 21 at. 7 p.m. ET/PT — drew 453,000 viewers, with 57,000 in the key 25-to-54 demographic, according to Nielsen. The full conversation was also available on CNN’s streaming platform and Variety‘s YouTube page.
Clips from the “Town Hall” were a major driver of social media traffic, reaching 46.29 million views across all of Variety‘s platforms. Instagram and Facebook lead with 20.35 million, followed by TikTok at 14.54 million and X at 11.4 million.
The Saturday night broadcast, filmed in front of an audience of University of Texas at Austin students, saw the reunion of Chalamet and McConaughey, who played son and father in 2014’s “Interstellar.” During the roughly 90-minute sitdown, the pair discussed memories from Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic, Chalamet’s Oscar-contending performance in “Marty Supreme” and took questions from the audience.
During their chat, Chalamet told McConaughey that “Interstellar” was his “favorite project” he’s ever been a part of, adding that he thought McConaughey’s Cooper was “his most fantastic role.”
“I know you were coming off ‘Dallas Buyers Club,’ but that movie, to me, was the origin point in seeing how you carried yourself on set, how seriously you and Christopher Nolan took the work,” Chalamet said. “It gave me a license. Coming out of high school, it’s hard to take yourself super seriously. You can feel like you’re wasting time or stuck-up or something. And I remember you had a yoga mat, and you’d be working out and sleeping on set. It was all very strange to me. But it was super inspiring. I just can’t thank you enough for being warm to me at that time, when you had no reason to be warm to me. Christopher as well. It just changed my life, man.”
McConaughey graciously responded, “Thanks for that, man. You were pretty easy to be warm to. I remember you had what I felt like was a feverish curiosity at that time. You were figuring some stuff out, but it seemed obvious to me that no matter what you were dealing with, you were going to make your way. And I believe you were in some sort of limbo. You were choosing — something about music, and somebody was putting pressure about, ‘Maybe go this way,’ and you wanted to go this way.”
Watch “A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey” below.