INTERVIEW: How the Lone Star kept Rising...

A major new critically-acclaimed series, two films nominated for Oscars and still with a healthy Texan respect for his position, his success and his work-ethic. It seems that Matthew McConaughey is in his prime and happier than ever with the roles he's getting.  John Mosby presents a look at his career and talks to the Oscar-nominated star about being the man of the moment, his latest projects and how his roles have changed his attitudes...

Nearly twenty years ago, I met an up-and-coming actor who had emerged into the mainstream spotlight with a bavura performance as a crusading lawyer in the big-screen version of A Time to Kill (1996) and as ex-sheriff Buddy Deeds in the same year’s Lone Star. His name was Matthew McConaughey and with his youthful good looks, rugged square jaw and take-the-work-seriously-but-have-fun outlook he was quickly gaining comparisons to a young Paul Newman. Hollywood was marketing him as the next big thing - and doing a good job of it -  but it was tempting to think that even if he lived up to that early promise, which he had every sign of doing, the industry would ultimately seek to pigeon-hole him as their, literally, blue-eyed boy. 

He oozed the better version of ‘good-old-boy’ Texan charm that was both respectful and irreverent - the kind of guy who would tell you the truth or spin you the tallest of tales over a cold beer and utterly convince you of his sincerity. Yet here was also the person who might get himself into the sort of trouble that makes headlines but doesn't leave ill-feeling. While other stars trashed hotel-rooms and caused grevious bodily harm to their careers, McConaughey was simply getting busted for getting high on weed and playing his bongos so loud that the neighbours had to be called to drag his naked form to cool down in the cells.  It was hard not to smile. Tabloids loved him as much as young girls, but so did their mums. 

Inevitable heart-throb status, even if it risked being fleeting, awaited. 

Only in some ways, it didn’t. Sure, the many subsequent bare-chested moments in movies didn’t hurt him at all, but it slowly became apparent that McConaughey was the kind of actor genuinely looking for longevity rather than fame. There was plenty of formula stuff in the mix, but every so often he surprised audiences with left-field choices that left his temporary contemporaries in the dust. To that end, even a casual glance through his résumé over the last two decades shows a man with a plan as well as a profession.

In hindsight, one of the earliest clues might have been 2002’s Reign of Fire – a high-action adventure that saw mythical dragons laying waste to contemporary England. Yes, it was overly ambitious with its reach far exceeding its mythological gauntleted grasp, but many a critic's eyes boggled at the almost-unrecognisable bald-headed, long-bearded McConaughey transformed from sex-symbol to wild-eyed Mad Max-ish renegade, the cigar-and-scenery-chewing Denton Van Zan. The film flopped, but it indicated that McConaughey was already taking career chances amid the fluff. Over the years he’s balanced a raft of successful but unremarkable rom-coms (Failure to Launch, Ghost of Girlfriends Past, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) and fun tongue-in-cheek romps (Tropic Thunder, Sahara, EDtv). But it’s in recent years that there’s been a fundamental shift in his career away from the disposable mainstream. After deliberately stepping back for a few years, searching for roles that meant something more, film-makers came to him with less obvious projects and with less sympathetic, but more nuanced characters.  One journalist labelled it the ‘McConaughaissance’ and the term went viral.

Did he truly see this as his 'second chance' to make a first impression?

“Not really. I see it as you get one first chance and now I’m in the same book, just a different chapter. I switched gears. It was a new time in my life and I wanted to recalibrate what I was doing with my career.  I enjoyed what I’ve done before, I enjoyed the last twenty-two years. I wouldn’t be sitting here now if I hadn’t done what I’ve done in the past," he explains. "I did take some time and make a conscious decision to say 'I don’t really feel like doing some of the roles that were similar to what I had been doing: action-adventures, some romantic comedies and such...'. But before I said ‘This is what I want to do…’ I had to say ‘No, I don’t want to do THAT right now...'. Somewhere in that impasse, which was about a year-and-a-half-to-two years where nothing came in… somewhere in there, in retrospect, I think I can say safely that I gained some anonymity by being in the shadows. I became  a fresher idea for people like William Friedkin and Steven Soderbergh. It was sitting back in the shadows and saying ‘I’m going to let something, the right thing come and find me...' "

The new chapter arguably started with his portryal of Mickey Haller in a solid adaptation of Michael Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer in 2011. Here was the first of a raft of roles in which McConaughey gave us complex characters, not ones merely designed to pander to key demographics. Reflecting the quality source material, McConaughey's pragmatic and somewhat slippery Haller was a character we didn't have to totally like to like his performance. That was followed by the likes of the eponymous hitman in the violent and menace-soaked Killer Joe, a fugitive on the run who befriends two boys in Mud, and a stripper called Dallas with all the right moves in Magic Mike.

This year, he’s achieved light-speed momentum and once again a 'Dallas' looms large.

On the big screen he’s a strong favourite to win an Academy Award for his central role in Dallas Buyers Club, a film based loosely on the real-life battle of Ron Woodruff, a redneck, homophobic rodeo worker who contracted HIV in the early days of the AIDS epidemic... and took on the might of the massive pharamacutical companies and FDA to get experimental drugs to those who needed them (though, admittedly, making a handsome personal profit in the process).  What could have been either a depressing slouch through two-hours of recrimination or just a formulaic underdog story, walks the line between them very well and comes across as a testament to opportunism, naivety and perseverance in equal measures.

The second current project is HBO’s True Detective (reviewed here) in which McConuaghey plays  Rust Cohle, a detective being asked to recall the details of a murder case that appears to have ended his career a decade before. I ask him, as one of a wave of  big-screen actors picking out key television projects, if he beleives that the bounadries between the cinema and television screens are now a thing of the past and performers are seeking out 'different' projects wherever they may be being made..?

“Hmmmm.  For me, it has been brought up: WHY do tv? The taboo of that bridge from film to television? It’s awash now. There’s been quality and arguably some of the best stuff has been on the ‘small’ screen," he tells me. " When I read the writer’s first two scripts, the quality was SO obvious. I didn’t have a hesitation of ‘Oh, this is tv…’ I would have had hesitation if it had been a situation where ‘If we get picked up again, you have to come back because we’ll have you under contract…’ But this was a finite series based on a 450-page script. The quality was SO good I didn’t hesitate about the fact it was small screen at all. That would be my answer…”

In both projects, the actor has slimmed down from his bulkier frame, going the route of other actors such as Christian Bale and Tom Hanks who have sometimes transformed themselves on an extreme level to capture the severe physicalities of their characters. Such was the extent of the physical change, there can't have been anyone who has seen photographs of McConaughey in character that didn't wonder if he was genuinely ill. What was his reaction when he first saw himself on screen as the sometimes almost-skeletal Ron Woodruff?

"The amount of energy I lost from the neck down, I got from the neck up. I’ve seen people who were dying of HIV or dying of cancer and the last thing to go is the neck,” he brings up his hand to chin level and strains upwards to emphasise. “They’re scraping and savage from the neck up. Their body is withering away, but they’re like a starving baby eagle in a nest, waiting for the worm. In the filming, I had plenty of energy. I needed three hours or less sleep a night. We shot it all in twenty-five days and the fact there was a singular focus and that’s a different kind of fatigue than the stop/start, exit/re-entry… I get more tired from that.”

“I remember seeing the first scene where Ron is in the (rodeo) stall with two ladies… I remember thinking ‘Jesus, you look like a reptile…’  Though there was no guarantee this was going to happen, I was 'in' it from then on. I just sat there and watched this guy called Ron Woodruff take the ride. I was not reminded that it was myself playing Ron Woodruff. There’s no guarantee of that when I watch a film, that that that I going to happen. I was thankful to say that, objectively, it happened. I watched him and afterwards I could be objective and think ‘What a wild character that was…’ But that was the initial shock... and then I was in…”  

Continues ... >>>

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