ALL THAT GLITTERS
Gold hits strikingly close to home for star Matthew McConaughey, Bob Thompson writes.
Matthew McConaughey NEW YORK continues his pursuit of excellence by portraying a rogues gallery of characters.
McConaughey won a 2014 Oscar for his drug-dealing Ron Woodroof role in Dallas Buyers Club and last summer he earned praise for defining American Civil War revolt leader Newton Knight in Free State of Jones.
Add to his rascal catalogue the irrepressible wheeler-dealer Kenny Wells in Gold.
“I’ll take empathy over sympathy any day,” says the 47-year-old flashing his trademark grin at a Manhattan hotel suite.
While the Gold story might be loosely inspired by the Canadian Bre-X mining scam, the Wells persona is all McConaughey.
In the movie, Wells is a Renobased prospector and speculator who teams up with a geologist (Edgar Ramirez), to search for gold deposits in the jungles of Indonesia.
As the unreliable narrator, Wells recalls, and the audience witnesses, a series of events that eventually become unhinged when financial kingpins and the Indonesian government conspire against him and his grand plans to strike it rich. Only his girlfriend Kay (Bryce Dallas Howard) stands by Kenny through the emotional turmoil and the dirty deeds.
“I like this guy,” McConaughey says. “For all his hustling and scheming, and morally objectionable (though) some of his dealings might be, I think he is pure.”
In fact, the actor was so enthralled with the film after one read of the Gold screenplay, that he signed on as producer, too.
“I felt not only did I know this guy inside out, I understood his relationships and how they connected with each other,” he says.
“I knew this world and I wanted to make sure I could protect it by being part of the (movie), team that approves what’s going on.”
Casting, especially, was key for him, and he pushed hard for Ramirez and Howard “because my Spidey senses were on track so it wasn’t an intellectual feeling at all.”
Certainly, Ramirez was impressed with McConaughey’s devotion to the production, even when filming in Thailand (which passes for Indonesia), proved to be difficult.
“It’s always a pleasant surprise when you connect with the actor opposite you in a film, and that doesn’t always happen,” says Ramirez. “It made things a lot easier having the headliner so into what he’s doing.”
Indeed, McConaughey’s attachment to Gold is strictly personal. McConaughey’s father was an oil-pipe salesman based in Texas. And like Kenny Wells, his dad was a smooth-talking pedlar who pushed boundaries to make a living.
“Yeah, my dad was always on the phone,” McConaughey says. “He was a bet-it-all, fourth and 40 hail-Mary pass guy and he would be throwing it to himself.”
Like Kenny in Gold, his father made a lot of his phone calls from bars to get his business done so he wouldn’t waste money on an office. McConaughey would also go along for the ride when his dad made some shady deals on the side.
“He would also take me along sometimes to collect with him, so he could shame them into paying, which was cool with me,” the actor says.
Kenny’s erratic relationship with Kay hits close to home, too. His mom married his dad three times and divorced him twice.
“Kenny and Kay live hard lives and don’t have the luxury of going to a marriage counsellor just like my parents,” McConaughey says.
Physically, he made the commitment to resemble the adults he remembered who were always hawking their wares. So he gained 40 pounds and shaved back his hairline.
“For Dallas Buyers Club I had to be emaciated because it was the responsibility of depicting somebody with (AIDS),” McConaughey says.
“Kenny doesn’t have to be like he is but guys like Kenny were consumers who smoke, drank and ate, and they were always hosting everywhere they went, so my imagination went flying.”
His next project is a variation on the theme of dysfunction in White Boy Rick, the story of a real-life adolescent now serving a life sentence for a drug deal.
“I play the father of the kid from Detroit,” he says. “The dad’s a real outcast.”
The enticement to enter the drama zone appears to be ongoing for the former poster boy of romantic-comedy fluff. And he readily confirms it. “I’m always looking for something that scares me, something that forces me to be brave,” McConaughey says. “I can’t do that in a comedy and I can’t do that even in a sci-fi movie.”