Romcom hunk turned Oscar-winner Matthew McConaughey tells Tom Shone how his father inspired his weightiest role yet
MATTHEW McConaughey rarely stays seated in interviews. The restlessness that has propelled this 47-year-old American to some of the most charismatic screen performances of recent years is not easy to disguise for any length of time.
Within minutes of meeting him, in a New York hotel room, he’s out of his chair, relating a memory that inspired his latest performance, as a rags-to-riches gold prospector in Stephen Gaghan’s film Gold.
The memory is this: the sight of his late father conducting business with a character known as “Chicago John” behind an abandoned shopping centre in Texas.
The year was 1987 and McConaughey was 17 years old.
“Chicago John had flashed his lights as we showed up,” says McConaughey, prowling the room like a jaguar.
“My dad told me, ‘Stay in the car’. The engine is still running and I’m sitting in the passenger seat. He’s over there about 20 yards away, with his back to me. It’s raining. It’s the day before Christmas. Chicago John opens the back of his van: microwaves, hair dryers, just like a little pawnshop. He gets out a shoebox and takes out something that’s wrapped in paper towels. Whatever it is, when Chicago John shows him, my dad’s shoulders go like this.”
McConaughey, his back to me, lets his shoulders ripple, as if a giant wave has passed through his body.
“Then my dad reaches into his coat, pulls out an envelope. He’s counting out money. He comes back, looking both ways and glancing up like a helicopter or something is following him. We’re up to some shady stuff, right? He hands the thing to me, says ‘Put that in the glove box’, then we get on the road and drive for five minutes, not a word said.
“All of a sudden he goes, ‘Hey buddy, open the glove box. See if it’s still there’. I unwrap it and there’s this big silver watch. My dad goes, ‘God damn, that’s a $22 000 Titanium Rolex. And I just got it for three grand!’ He was so happy. I’m like, ‘ Wow’.”
The way the actor tells it, this moment might have been the making of him. There’s some residue of the experience in his two-bit criminal defence attorney in Brad Furman’s The Lincoln Lawyer (2011); his mangy, mythic drifter in Jeff Nichols’s Mud (2012); and his Oscar-winning turn as a rodeo-cowboy-turnedAids activist in JeanMarc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club (2013) – all inspirational hucksters and hustlers of a particularly American sort, cracked dreamers cut from the same cloth as Mark Twain’s Riverboat King, or, for that matter, the current president.
“The doing of the deal. Chasing the imaginary thing. The wing and a prayer. The resilience to be that down and out that many times, but just to will something into becoming,” says McConaughey when I ask him what attracted him to the role in Gold of Kenny Wells, a bald, fat prospector who strikes it rich, loses everything, then strikes it rich again.
“Kenny’s so pure of heart. Is he also a f***up and a dreamer? Yes, but that’s part of his purity. He’s the poet, he’s the rapper. I don’t meet many people like that, and when I have – bravo.”
McConaughey could equally be talking about himself: the dreamer, the raconteur whose anecdotes come flecked with sun-kissed mysticism and bumper-sticker wisdom. You don’t so much interview McConaughey as get an audience with him. A lot of what comes out of his mouth he ends up writing down in a book of aphorisms, jokes, one-liners, lyrics and rhymes which he started in 1988.
“I’m thinking, would that work in stand-up? Or would that work in a one-act play? I don’t know, but I’ve got them all. I put one in last night. It’s in a computer file, I’m at 38 000 words.
“I’ve got people wanting me to write a memoir,” he continues. “Like, I’m 47. Memoir? What are you talking about? It feels a bit retro-jective or something. I’m still a verb, you know?”
I’ve interviewed McConaughey once before, in 2014, around the time his gnarly, vital performance in Dallas Buyers Club was headed for the Academy Awards.
Then, too, he was up out of his seat, acting out each part of every romcom for which he’d ever stripped to his chest.
At the time, I put it down to an excess of awards-season mojo. But it turns out he’s always like this.
The Oscar has changed him very little, in fact. The solo road trips he used to take in his Airstream motor home are less frequent now that he and his wife, the Brazilian model and designer Camila Alves, have three children to look after.
“My solo trip is my work now,” he says. “That’s my walkabout.
“Every studio has their list of actors they’ll do certain films with. Has the Oscar helped? Sure. But then, look at what I’ve been attracted to.”
Since Dallas Buyers Club, he’s been an astronaut in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar ,a confederate army deserter in Free State of Jones, an unconventional cop on the small screen in True Detective, and, currently on circuit here in East London, the voice of a koala impresario in the animation Sing.
With the exception of this last project, taken on with his children in mind, they’ve been films “in the middle”, artistically interesting rather than blockbusting.
“Really, if anything, the Oscar gave me some affirmation to go ‘keep being selfish’.”
Here, as is his habit when describing the process of listening to himself – that quiet voice that sometimes has to fight to be heard – McConaughey slips into the third person.
“The more personal you got McConaughey, the more about the process you got, the less about the results you gave a damn about, the less you asked permission, the less you considered what might be the right thing to do, you got better results. It gave me some confidence to go, ‘Hey, keep looking for that thing that turns you on’.”
He continues to pursue parts in independent films like Gus Van Sant’s maligned The Sea of Trees, or Gaghan’s Gold, a performance for which he put on three stone, with a diet of burgers, pizza and beer.
“I had said early on that this guy is a consumer of life,” says McConaughey. “He’s not fat. He’s full. My family thought I was Captain Fun. They were loving me. I’m like, ‘Pizza night? Yes! Milkshakes for breakfast? Come on! Let’s go!’”
That it took so many years playing pony in the romcom pit mine – showing off his sculpted abs to Kate Hudson and J Lo in films such as The Wedding Planner and How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days before he reawakened the ambition that had first thrust him onto the scene, in 1996’s Time To Kill – is in part down to prodigious pleasure-loving instincts.
“Was I on the beach every day with my shirt off?” he asks. “Damn right I was. I worked to get a house in Malibu, California. That’s exactly what I was doing, thank you very much. Did I understand objectively I’d become part of the brand? Yeah.”
But, he adds, the socalled “McConaissance” that saw him apparently metamorphose from happy-go-lucky romcom gewgaw to serious thesp has been overstated.
“It’s not as much of a 180 as people like to make out: ‘He used to just live on the beach’ – Hey, give me the lines. What are the scenes today? Just rolled out of bed. Then one day he goes, ‘I’m going to be a serious actor.’ And that’s bull**** , you know. I had just as many notes in the How To Lose a
AGuy script as I had in Gold or Dallas Buyers Club.”
Just as McConaughey took his time to come to acting – he was 23 at the time of his breakout role in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused – he was a late arrival in his family, too, a surprise baby: his two brothers were already in their teens when he was born. By then, his mother, a nursery teacher, and his father, a pipe-supply salesman who died of a heart attack in 1992, had been trying for a third child for a decade.
“He didn’t even show up to the hospital when I came out,” he says. “I’m a mama’s boy. Papa was working. Work’s going good. He’s got his first son working within the company. Mom pretty much raised me.” The McConaugheys were a family of big talkers, all competing to be heard at the dinner table. Matthew was headed for law school when he decided he wanted to be an actor, after Don Phillips, the casting director of Dazed and Confused, spotted him in a bar and asked him to audition. He can still remember making the call to his father to tell him that he wanted to drop law for drama. “Thinking my dad’s going to go, ‘You want to what, boy?’ I’m like, ‘I want to change my major. I want to go to film school’. There’s silence for one, two, three, four, five seconds. Then my dad goes, ‘Is that what you want to do?’ ‘Yes, sir, it is.’ ‘Well, don’t halfa*** it.’ “That was him saying, ‘Way to go, Bud. Go do it.’ They were very much like that, our family. It was tough, but then it was always like if you just come face the giant, the giant will go, ‘You’re cool.’?”
That lesson has since stood him in good stead for surviving the ups and downs of Hollywood.
After five years of panning for acting gold in indies, he’s finally taken a role in a special-effects heavy blockbuster, an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower that he describes as a “mythic, dark Christian tale of good versus evil”.
He says: “If it works, it’d be my first franchise, first thing I’ve done that could be like a two, three.”
But the project that’s really got him fired up is White Boy Rick, the true story of the Detroit drug dealer turned police informant whose dual life put him in the crosshairs of the FBI from age 17.
“Do I know what to do with it?” asks McConaughey. “No. I start working scene by scene. All of a sudden all the little beautiful truths and consistencies come up. Let’s dive into the mystery on this one. Trust that we’re going to come up on the other side with enough air. Then it’s fun.” — The Daily Telegraph