The “McConaissance” is something which could – and should – be studied for an entire myriad of reasons.
In just a matter of years, Matthew McConaughey successfully traded in his well-established (and extremely well-paid) career as the shirtless goofball on screens to become one of the generation’s most accomplished thespians. And it might not surprise you to learn the transition from original recipe to 2.0 wasn’t exactly a smooth or seamless one.
“I look up and notice, I’m a rom-com, romantic comedy guy,” Matthew McConaughey recounted to Gary Vaynerchuk back in 2021 (and again more recently to Steven Bartlett for his Diary of a CEO appearance).
“And I’m owning this because I’m like, ‘You damn right, those rom-coms are paying for the house that I’m renting, on the beach that I’m going shirtless on.’ Guilty of that, you know? But I did want to do some other things.”
He continued: “That’s when I went, ‘Okay, well I can’t do what I want to do – I’ve got to quit doing what I’ve been doing.’ I went off back down to Texas and hit out and called my agent and money people and everything, said, ‘I’m not doing those anymore.’”
“20 months… nothing. No work. Nada.”
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“I called it early on. Believe me, I dropped tears to make the decision. I even thought about a career change… this is when Hollywood really got the message,” explained McConaughey, who would soon be confronted with his greatest temptation yet.
“An offer comes in for a script at $8 million bucks. I said, ‘No, thank you.’ They come back with $10 million. I say, ‘No, thank you.’ They come back at $12.5 million – small pause. They come back at $14.5 million. I say, ‘Let me read that script again.’”
“I read the script, Gary V. Guess what? It had the exact same words as the original offer, but I read the script again and it was better written. [Laughs.] It was. It was so much better written [Laughs.].”
“I said: no.”
The unnamed project Matthew McConaughey was offered US$14.5 million for would eventually fail to launch, relegated to some dusty corner of Los Angeles. This short-term sacrifice and temporary hardship, however, would prove to be extremely worthwhile.
“I got to feeling like, for a few years, I was doing something that I liked to do with romantic and action comedies. But believe me, I noticed there were other things that were not coming in,” McConaughey previously admitted to Deadline.
“And if they were coming in, it was in an independent form with a much smaller paycheque, and nobody really wanting to get behind them. I’m not going to say it bothered me. It was more like, there were other things I wanted to do, and it became clear I had to make changes if I wanted to do them.”
“I couldn’t just say, ‘Hey guys, I want to do these other things,’ and have them say, ‘Good on you, great!’ It was, ‘You know what? We’re not sending ‘em.’”
“So I consciously recalibrated my relationship with my career. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, because I wasn’t getting those things. But I knew I could say no to the things I’d been doing. In saying no to those things, I knew work was going to dry up for a while. I still said no.”
“‘No’ lasted six months. That stretched to a year, and still nothing came in. Year and a half, still nothing. At two years, all of a sudden – in my opinion – I became a new good idea for some good directors.”
The circuit-breaker film after his two-year hiatus was, of course, The Lincoln Lawyer. Brad Furman’s adaptation of the Michael Connelly novel would place Matthew McConaughey at centre stage as Los Angeles-based defence attorney, Mickey Haller, effectively reminding the world of his serious dramatic ability glimpsed in A Time To Kill, Amistad, and We Are Marshall.
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McConaughey recalled: “Steven Soderbergh called with Magic Mike. William Friedkin called with Killer Joe. Rick Linklater called me with Bernie – but I probably would have done that anyway because he knows what I can do.”
“In those two years that I took off, I didn’t re-brand. I un-branded.”
The second pivotal moment in the career of Matthew McConaughey was when director Jeff Nichols decided to cast him as the titular fugitive of 2012 indie flick Mud, wherein the former was given a prime opportunity to explore a darker persona, and back-to-back with his stint as the titular character in Killer Joe.
Why exactly do we consider Mud more notable than Killer Joe in this specific time frame? As it so happens, the Jeff Nichols picture had caught the attention of one Christopher Nolan – no introduction necessary – who would eventually seek him out to lead Interstellar.
The years between 2012 to 2015 wouldn’t just be a whirlwind period of the McConaissance, but also proof that McConaughey’s gambit had paid off. Like Cooper in Nolan’s sci-fi epic, sacrificing a few years had saved both Matthew McConaughey himself and his career in the long run.
After once again demonstrating massive commercial viability as Dallas in Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, he won the critics over and his first Academy Award for Best Actor in the universally-acclaimed Dallas Buyers Club; gained immortality in the pantheon of bro-flicks with Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street; and there was also the small detail of starring in True Detective season 1 (one of modern television’s greatest drama series).
“I want to be surrounded by a good filmmaker. I want to be in a good story… I want to be surrounded by things that I feel can add up to excellence. Then I feel like I can fly.“
The moral of the story? It’s never too late to reinvent yourself. All you need are the stones to refuse an easy paycheque and the path of least resistance.
Also read:
- 4 Life Lessons Every Man Can Learn From Matthew McConaughey
- Matthew McConaughey Reunites With ‘True Detective’ Creator For Crime Thriller Movie
- The ‘True Detective’ Return We’ve All Been Waiting For Is On The Cards, Says Series Creator
- Matthew McConaughey Explains The Origins Of ‘Alright, Alright, Alright’
