Out of this world ... Matthew McConaughey with Anne Hathaway in Interstellar. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied
A DECISION to step away from the rom-coms that made his name has paid off for Matthew McConaughey, with an Oscar in the bag and the lead in one of the year’s most highly anticipated movies.
A few years ago, Matthew McConaughey was so unhappy with the direction his career was headed that he decided to just stop. People in Hollywood thought he’d lost his marbles.
“It wasn’t a decision that I was really soliciting other people’s advice for,” says the actor, in that familiar Texas drawl (it’s mildly disappointing that he doesn’t open our conversation with an, “all right, all right, all right”).
“I suppose a lot of people outside of my earshot were going, ‘What is he doing?’ He just turned down another romantic comedy! But it was something that I needed to do,” McConaughey says.
At the time, he’d just done The Lincoln Lawyer (the sort of film he wanted to do more of), and he was about to become a father for the first time (he’s now dad to Levi, Vida and Livingston, with wife Camila Alves). He knew he needed to make wholesale changes.
Formidable screen presence ... Matthew McConaughey in his Oscar-winning role in Dallas Buyers Club. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied
“I’d been responsible with my money up until that point so it wasn’t like I was going to have to sell the house. I said to myself, just take your time, because you’re going to get anxious because you’re not working, but take your time, and you’ll find something and it will come to you. And it did.”
Indeed, this year, in one fell swoop, he went from rom-com staple (he was in pretty much everything that starred Kate Hudson, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jennifer Garner) to a formidable screen presence.
His Oscar-winning performance as Aids sufferer Ron Woodruff in The Dallas Buyers Club was mind-blowing enough, but then he followed that up with another stunning performance as a damaged policeman in the brilliant TV series True Detective.
Asked how he reflects on that Oscar win some six months on, he exhales.
“It was a wonderful, wonderful moment in my career,” he says, “but I’ve had no sense of, ‘Aah, I made it.’ I’ve not had a sense of it being a destination. It’s funny, the more and more I’ve worried less about the result, the more results I’ve gotten.”
Now he’s finishing the year in huge fashion as a pilot looking to save the human race in Christopher Nolan’s epic space odyssey Interstellar (you’ll be twice as blown away if you see it in IMAX).
Winners ... Actress Jennifer Lawrence and Best Actor Award winner Matthew McConaughey backstage during the Oscars. Picture: Christopher Polk (Getty Images) Source: Getty Images
“It’s enormous,” says McConaughey of the film. “The only way I can describe it to people is that it’s an experience. It’s worth going for that.”
In the film, McConaughey plays Cooper, a widowed pilot who leaves his two young kids to join a group of scientists (one of whom is Anne Hathaway) to travel beyond the solar system in search of a new home for humankind.
McConaughey liked the fact that Coop wasn’t just the “heroic character”.
“That’s all great, but a lot of times the heroes are just boring. I didn’t want to be a white knight and Chris and I agreed on that, and it was just about working out how to get that across.”
McConaughey says he had to find ways to make Coop’s journey personal. He didn’t have to look far.
“In this, I’ve had practical experience,” he muses. “I’ve had goodbyes where a child was crying and didn’t want me to go.
“Mind you, that was for a week or a weekend, it wasn’t for however long with no return ticket.”
Still, McConaughey reckons that goodbyes are weirdly unemotional for him.
“I get much more emotional when it’s the birth of something, or the joy of something,” he says. “In regards to Coop, I related to him because the thought of missing that joy of kids growing up, is probably what affected me.”
Damaged ... Matthew McConaughey as Rust Cohle in the acclaimed True Detective. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied
Indeed, he says since becoming a father, he’s become less tolerant of his own public status, wanting his own kids to have as normal a life as possible.
“People are always wanting to do things for you, but I want to cook my own dinner, and I want to go to the supermarket,” he says.
He also says that while he “cashed that cheque in a long time ago”, he misses anonymity. “What happens is, you get to be a known face — a familiar face — and you don’t meet strangers any more,” he says.
“You’re asking questions to me because you have a sense of me. So there’s no way that you can just sit here and say, ‘So what do you do? Do you have a dog? Do you have kids? Do you have a family?’ Because you already know these things.”
His family, he says, is not interested in his celebrity. They’re proud of his work, but not the bells and whistles that go with it.
“Our family doesn’t get overly dramatic,” he says. “And I’m pretty big in not creating any false drama. I don’t like getting caught up in false drama, and there’s a bunch of it [in Hollywood] and people get more dramatic around me sometimes. And I’m like, nuh-uh, stop it.”
Not that he’s not proud of what he’s achieved; a few nights before our interview, he’d been the recipient of an American Cinematheque Award, celebrating his 22-year career and found it humbling.
Family first ... Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves attend the European premiere of Interstellar at Odeon Leicester Square in London. Picture: Stuart C. Wilson (Getty Images) Source: Getty Images
“I don’t even think it’s half-time yet, as far as the career goes, but all right, this is what you’ve done so far, and all right, you’ve left an imprint along the way,” McConaughey says.
And though at 45, he says he “doesn’t feel old”, he has been getting a kick out of realising that young actors are studying his work.
“I’m starting to notice that people are starting to come up, and they know my work, or I’m the proverbial Mr McConaughey to them. I don’t feel like I’m that much older, but I look back and I go, yeah, you know what, I do have a lot of experience,” he smiles.
“I have been doing this for 22 years, and I have grown in this — I do know more about it now than I did then.
“I’ve learnt some things that work, and I’ve learnt a lot of things that don’t work. You have to embrace all of it.”
Interstellar opens Thursday.
Honoree Matthew McConaughey (left) and director/writer Christopher Nolan. Picture: Mark Davis (Getty Images) Source: Getty Images
WORTH ANOTHER LOOK
It’s now been five years since Matthew McConaughey said farewell to the rom-com genre with the thoroughly forgettable and by-the-numbers Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past.
McConaughey kicked off his career renaissance with 2011 hit, The Lincoln Lawyer, and had another success with a show-stealing performance in Magic Mike the following year.
But in-between times he made a few gems that somehow slipped through the cracks.
BERNIE [2011]
Black comedy directed by Richard Linklater and starring Jack Black as a popular small-town mortician who murders his elderly, rich and exceedingly unpopular friend (Shirley MacLaine) and then tries to convince the town she had it coming. McConaughey more than holds his own as the showboating prosecutor — and the sole voice of reason — who is trying to make sure Bernie gets his just deserts.
MUD [2012]
This coming-of-age drama, set in a close-knit fishing community on the Mississippi River, is one of McConaughey’s finest films. Despite having the title character role, playing a shifty fugitive drifter who befriends an impressionable youth, McConaughey is a somewhat peripheral figure.
In his five-star review, Leigh Paatsch said: “Mud is a classic tale of innocence lost and wisdom gained, one that holds its own against the likes of To Kill a Mockingbird and the best-known works of Mark Twain.”
KILLER JOE [2011]
Oscar-winning veteran William Friedkin’s (The French Connection, The Exorcist) film didn’t even get a theatrical release in Australia and performed poorly at the box office. But the southern-fried crime thriller, which also starred Emile Hirsch, Gina Gershon and Juno Temple, has a 78 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with special praise singled out for McConaughey’s rotten-to-the-core detective, who also sidelines as a contract killer.
