Matthew McConaughey seems to have gotten as tired of seeing himself in risible rom-coms like “Fool’s Gold” as you have. In Friday’s dark thriller “Killer Joe,” the Texas actor plays a cop and moonlighting hitman who is most definitely on the wrong side of the law.
He seduces a mentally slow childlike girl. He breaks a woman’s nose with one fierce punch. He sadistically forces her to perform unspeakable acts on a KFC drumstick.
The film is so bloody and full of — as the ratings board put it — “graphic disturbing content,” it got slapped with the dreaded NC-17 rating.
Cool!
Kate Hudson may be shuddering, but audiences should think this new McConaughey is all-right-all-right.
The actor’s surprising slate of upcoming films don’t so much mark a new direction as a return to the kind of work he did earlier in his career, back in the mid-’90s, when he got everyone in Hollywood buzzing with scene-stealing performances in “Dazed and Confused” and “Lone Star.”
Currently in theaters is “Magic Mike.” In the well-received tale of male strippers, McConaughey doesn’t walk completely away from his old image as a shirtless pretty boy, but at least the movie is from a respected director (Steven Soderbergh), and it doesn’t end with him running to stop a girl from getting on a plane.
The actor has said that 2011’s “The Lincoln Lawyer” was responsible for “re-tilting” how he was perceived, and helped him break out of the rom-com prison. Hollywood, always a town eager to put its performers in a box, now seems willing to give the 42-year-old different roles.
“I’m happy for him that he has a lot of opportunities now,” says Avy Kaufman, the casting director of “Lone Star.” “He’s at an age where he’s grown in different directions. When they get older, people become right for parts that they weren’t when they were younger.”
Get ready for more, including “Mud” and “The Paperboy,” two indie dramas that premiered at Cannes earlier in the year. “Mud,” from writer-director Jeff Nichols of last year’s excellent “Take Shelter,” has been described as a modern spin on Huck Finn. McConaughey plays a fugitive who’s discovered hiding out on an Arkansas island by two young boys. (The film doesn’t yet have a release date.)
“The Paperboy,” out this fall, is director Lee Daniels’ follow-up to “Precious.” It’s the story of a reporter (McConaughey) who investigates a death-row inmate (John Cusack), and the movie has been generating a lot of ink for its shocking scenes, including one in which Nicole Kidman pees on Zac Efron (c’mon, he had it coming) and another involving McConaughey and gay S&M.
Still, Nichols admits he was hesitant at first to take a chance on McConaughey, despite having written the part in “Mud” specifically for him more than a decade ago.
“You’re questioning, like, ‘Well, is this still the guy I want to do this with?’ ” Nichols says. “It really took meeting him in person and talking to him about the character and the script, and I quickly realized that absolutely, this was the guy.”
Nichols says McConaughey was refreshingly low-maintenance on a remote Southern set without cellphone service or luxury hotels. The actor even volunteered to spend a few nights alone in a tent on the island where the production would be filming.
McConaughey has said that his current career shift isn’t part of some carefully thought-out strategy that he and his team are implementing. Things just happen, in the way that his foray into rom-coms just happened.
“Truth is, I was in a colder part of my career at the time. I was coming off, what was it, ‘U-571’? I had to try different things,” McConaughey told the UK’s Guardian newspaper. “I did action movies, crime and then I did ‘The Wedding Planner.’ I thought, let’s go see what it’s like to just be light; never done that before. And then, s - - t . . . it made a whole bunch of money, and they came back and offered me more.”
“S - - t” is right. Before he knew it, he was starring in “How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days” and “Failure To Launch.” Critics trashed him. Longtime fans were left scratching their heads.
It’s hard to believe McConaughey’s assertion that a change in direction was not intentional. His new trajectory also coincides with other big life changes, including turning 40, marrying longtime girlfriend Camila Alves and having a second child, with a third on the way.
“He’s a very intelligent guy, and he’s very much a part of what’s going on,” Nichols says. “This stuff doesn’t happen by accident. You can pick challenging projects. He has full control over that, and is aware of it. It’s not like you stumble backwards into a movie like ‘Mud.’ ”
On the set, the actor never spoke about any big epiphanies, but he did occasionally make reference to rom-coms.
“He made a point about acting once where he said, ‘In romantic comedies, the emotions can’t get too far out of range or level. You can’t get too angry or too sad,’ ” Nichols says. “‘You have to keep everything in this safe zone.’ ”
In “Killer Joe” and his other upcoming features, McConaughey is anything but safe.
reed.tucker@nypost.com