National Post (National Edition)
‘Riding it live’ in the COVID-19 pandemic
McConaughey puts his dude persona to work
Matthew McConaughey has some deep thoughts, man. The Oscar winner, whose offscreen persona comes off as “dude” incarnate, is spending his quarantine not just hunkering down, but having some big thinks. He’s diving into paradoxes, personal responsibility, mental calisthenics and hand-to-hand combat.
“I’m just riding it live and going with how am I feeling,” said McConaughey. “People are losing their grease trapped at home. How do you have people own up to the reality that, yes, it is a horror show, and at the same time you don’t want to create chaos? The hard part is there’s no playbook.”
But he’s found a lane. Since the pandemic sent millions of people inside, McConaughey has popped up in the most McConaughey of places: on a Zoom call with his fellow University of Texas faculty members; delivering masks to his local police station; playing a soap opera doctor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon; carousing around his backyard as the masked character Bobby Bandito.
Is the man just bored? “Look, when a crisis like this comes and it causes disruption, your purpose can become very clear,” said McConaughey, 50, from his home in Austin. “I’ve just been going, ‘Hey, lemme grab a hold of some messages that I truly believe need to be put out.’”
In March, the message on his radar was “stay at home,” but McConaughey didn’t see “an aggressive take on it.” He wanted to fix that, so he shot a 90-second video urging folks to “turn a red light into a green light” and “just keep living.”
“People thought that staying home was a cowardly move, so I thought it was important to get the message out there that this is sort of a paradox of the times. Your best weapon is to stay at home. That’s how we quote-unquote ‘win’ at handto-hand combat,” he said.
But he also he wanted to lighten the mood.
“I felt myself and everybody feeling overwhelmed with the solemn infomercial PSAs. We’re past the shock. Let’s put a character’s spin on it and have a little fun with it, so maybe its weirdly cool,” he said of his Bobby Bandito PSA. In it, bounty hunter “Bobby B” demonstrates how to DIY a mask out of a bandana. Mud director Jeff Nichols helped shoot it in McConaughey’s backyard.