Matthew McConaughey is known for his diverse acting. But when it comes to performing emotional scenes, he says he prefers the first take.

The Academy-winning star points to a scene in Interstellar, heavy on emotion, that unfolds as he travels through space while watching videos of his kids growing older, drawing tears to his eyes.

The impactful scene, McConaughey recalls, was shot in one take. 

“Those emotional scenes like this, I like to do them first up and let’s get the close-up, so I remember sitting down and [Christopher Nolan] was like, ‘Okay, so let’s rehearse and we’ll run the video.'”

The noted actor adds that after one take, the emotional authenticity turned into acting, which he tends to avoid for scenes like these.

“Why? Because everything after take one is acting, but take one, I don’t know what I’m going to see, so if I can be relaxed enough and I know the scenes where I’m going to see my children who have evidently grown older and I haven’t.”

To make the scene believable, McConaughey recalls that he imagined the fictional story as reality in his mind: the pain of losing the time to see his kids grow up.

“The idea that how much, if I personalize that, oh my gosh. If I was dead, what if I didn’t see [his three real-life children] Vida and Levi and Livingston for that many, oh, that’s a sick feeling,” he says, referring to his children.

Given the raw emotions unfolding on camera, he is right to express surprise when he learns the scene has become a pop-culture meme.

At first, he tells John Mayer, on whose show SiriusXM’s How’s Life he recently appeared, that he did not know the emotional scene became “a massive visual milestone,” noting the film has seen “a resurgence in popularity over the years.”

Interstellar is streaming on Netflix.