Behind the eyes of a farmer-turned-revolutionary
McConaughey’s character in Civil War drama leads rebels against Confederate army
Matthew McConaughey looked his long-dead character in the eye and knew all he needed to know about portraying real-life Mississippi farmer-turned-revolutionary Newton Knight.
McConaughey plays Knight in the Civil War-era historical drama Free State of Jones, opening Friday.
“You can look in that man’s eyes and go, “Oh, OK, that’s a special kind of man,’ ” McConaughey said in a recent phone interview with the Star. “There’s a man who has an omnipresent, long view and has seen some things that not many people have seen and is not sentimental about it.”
With his fixed gaze, Knight also bears a striking resemblance to the Oscar winner (for Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club), as seen onscreen and especially in the poster for the film. The actor said unlike most movie posters, which are shot long after production has wrapped and just before a film hits theatres, this image of his weary, muddy, bearded face was taken about a week before filming finished.
“Even if I had the beard and looked the same (now) I couldn’t rekindle whatever was in my eyes in that shot, or if I could it would be damned hard,” said McConaughey. “We were shooting one shot. That was me and it happened, and that was Newt Knight.”
An article in Smithsonian Magazine said those who knew Knight described him as six-foot-four with black hair and beard, a “big heavy-set man, quick as a cat.”
“We cheated on the height,” the sixfoot-one McConaughey said with a chuckle.
The film is about a little-known episode in American history when a group of disgruntled former soldiers, farmers and runaway slaves banded together to form an autonomous county outside the Confederacy.
It is a passion project for writerdirector Gary Ross, a multiple Oscar nominee for screenwriting ( Big, Dave and Seabiscuit). He also directed The Hunger Games.
Ross jokingly refers to Free State of Jones as “an academic mid-life crisis.” Once he started to delve into Knight’s story, “I just couldn’t stop reading,” leading to years of study of the man who led a rebellion of those who fought back against a corrupt Confederacy. House of Cards’ Mahershala Ali and The Americans’ Keri Russell also star.
Unusual for a southerner of his time, Knight believed in racial equality, married and had a family with a black woman named Rachel (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and worked to ensure African-Americans had the right to vote.
“It’s a hard thing for us to realize how progressive Newt was,” Ross said.
One of Rachel’s and Newt’s descendants, Davis Knight, helps contemporize the story when he ends up in court in 1948 for the crime of marrying a white woman in contravention of Mississippi’s racist “one drop rule.”
Knight’s story is a complex one that Ross starts in graphic fashion, with the bloody fight between Union and Confederate soldiers.
“I was an observer on those days. I was going out on the set with my son,” said McConaughey, who later filmed some very dramatic battle scenes. “It was a real eye-opener, my oh my; it was like the term sitting ducks if you’re on the front line going up against these Union forces with the artillery they had and the cannons, and the chances of survival were so low.”
McConaughey said Ross didn’t shy away from how he shot scenes on both the battleground and in a field hospital to advance “telling the truth of the story and the times.”
“In the Civil War hospital, that’s really graphic stuff in there,” added Ross. “We have a responsibility to depict what that looked like, what that was really like and to show what the human cost of war was,” he said.
McConaughey will be seen next alongside Bryce Dallas Howard and Edgar Ramirez in drama Gold, playing a character based on Calgary stock trader David Walsh, whose gold mining company Bre-X Minerals took centre stage in a massive fraud in the 1990s. With a padded belly and balding hairline, McConaughey is unrecognizable in the first still from the film and shots taken this spring while he was making the movie in New York.