Matthew McConaughey admits he wasn’t wearing seatbelt when plane dropped 4,000 feet

Matthew McConaughey has admitted that he wasn't wearing a seatbelt while onboard a Lufthansa flight that experienced severe turbulence last month.

The Wolf of Wall Street actor was on board the Lufthansa Flight 469 on 1 March, which dropped 4,000 feet while on route from Austin, Texas to Frankfurt, Germany.

After crew reported severe turbulence, the flight was forced to make an emergency landing at Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, before seven people who were hurt were taken to hospital.

McConaughey was one of those on board the flight with wife Camila Alves and now, over a month on, he has looked back at the experience that sounds more like a scene right out of Top Gun.

The Oscar-winning actor admitted that he was not wearing his seatbelt during the frightening ordeal and was instead 'held down by his tray table'.

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Speaking on Kelly Ripa’s Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast, the actor said: "My tray table is what held me down. I did not have my seatbelt on, and there was not a seatbelt warning right before it happened."

The actor added that he reached over to his wife to make sure that her seatbelt was on, saying: "[We] held hands just saying, 'OK, is that it? Is there another one coming?'

"It was odd. You hear people's reactions. Some people were ghost silent. Some people had big bursts of laughter. And it was not like, 'Oh, this is fun.' It was like, 'I'm in shock'."

Along with Alves, McConaughey was also travelling with a friend who happened to be a pilot.

In fact, the actor's fears was quashed with his pilot being there, as he reassured him everything would be okay.

"I happened to have a friend of mine sitting next to me who was a pilot. And he was calm as could be," McConaughey said.

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"I was like, 'Can the plane hold that?' And he was like, 'These things are so tested, that yes, don't worry, the plane structurally can hold that'. That was a big relief."

Despite the reassurance, that didn't stop the big drops being pretty petrifying.

Recalling on them, the Dallas Buyers Club star said: "It's suspended disbelief. I mean, it's zero gravity.

"Your red wine and the glass and the plates that your food was on are all suspended, floating, still just in the air.

"And to look at it for that long, which wasn't that long - one, two, three, four [seconds] - and then everything just comes crashing down."