Don’t call it a comeback — it’s The McConaissance.
Best known for Chicklet teeth, washboard abs and two-dimensional roles in dishwater rom-coms, Matthew McConaughey has transformed himself — or, more accurately, revealed himself — to be one of our greatest living actors.
This year, he is the odds-on favorite to win the Oscar for his role as the real-life AIDS activist Ron Woodroof in “Dallas Buyers Club,” for which he became a wraith. As Rust Cohle in the electrifying new HBO series “True Detective,” McConaughey turns what could have been a pat archetype — the obsessive, lovelorn cop with an addiction to booze and the job — into an American original.
“That character has such a dark view of the world and is so far from who Matthew is,” says writer-director Richard Linklater, a longtime friend and collaborator. “And that look — that haggard, hungry, lean look. Again and again, Matthew surprises, and you go, ‘Holy s–t.’ ”
“There’s more to him than meets the eye,” says producer Scott Steindorff, who worked with McConaughey on “The Lincoln Lawyer.” “I don’t think people took him seriously before. They saw him as a lighthearted actor; they didn’t know the depths of him.”
McConaughey, now 44, had been a Hollywood punchline for decades. He was the party boy arrested in 1999 for a two-day binge and playing the bongos, naked and high. “Oh yeah, bro. I love playing drums naked,” he later said. “Who doesn’t love comfort and music?”
He’s the stoner-philosopher who, on Twitter, lists his residence as “Earth, Universe,” the shirt-free exhibitionist mocked in Matt Damon’s drawling, dead-on impressions on Letterman.
While he publicly laughed along, inside, McConaughey chafed.
“For a while, the headline on me was that I was the good-lookin’ shirtless guy livin’ life on the beach, getting high,” McConaughey told The Daily Beast. “Like I just roll out of bed and just kind of go do-the-do. Well, s–t! That was the brand, and the movies that I was doing didn’t really do anything to dissuade people from that . . . I wasn’t getting offered certain scripts — not necessarily because I couldn’t do them; I could have done them five years ago — but it was because of that perception of me.”
Smarter than he appears, McConaughey himself dubbed his career turnaround “the McConaissance.” Intentional or not, it’s a play on the French word méconnaissance, which means “misrecognition.”
McConaughey was born in Uvalde, Texas, the youngest of three sons, one nicknamed Rooster. His mother Kay, who goes by K-Mac, was a substitute teacher, and his father, Jim, was a former NFL player-turned-truck driver.
When McConaughey was young, his parents were divorced twice and married three times, and he was never told about either split or remarriage — he just always thought they were together.
“I thought Mom was on some extended vacations,” he told NPR last August. “I thought she was down in Florida . . . I didn’t question why Dad and I moved into a trailer park outside of town, and it was just he and I for a whole summer. I didn’t question it.”
He was a popular kid: a straight-A student, voted “Most Handsome” in high school, the son of a former Green Bay Packer — a “clean-cut, look-you-in-the-eye, straight-up guy,” says Linklater. For a time, he thought about becoming a lawyer, but while at the University of Texas at Austin he fell in love with storytelling and decided to pursue a career in film.
In 1993, while still a college senior, he was discovered by a casting director at a Texas bar. That led to McConaughey’s film debut as the sleazy stoner Wooderson in Linklater’s Gen-X classic “Dazed and Confused.”
Then, five days into filming, McConaughey’s dad suffered a heart attack and died.
“The guy was like 22 years old, and he loses his father,” Linklater says. “And he just seemed determined. He was like, ‘I’m here to get it done.’ ” His character’s defining speech — a tautology declaring that the point of life is to “just keep livin’ ” — came out of a conversation with Linklater about his grief.
“Matthew’s very intelligent,” Linklater says. “His brain just has a different receptor. If you can tap into that, he’s very open.”
McConaughey’s first words on screen — “Alright, alright, alright” — were improvised. “Do you know why I said ‘alright’ three times?” he later said. “Because I’m in my car, I’m high, I’ve got my rock ’n’ roll, but I don’t have the chick. So I got three out of four that matter to me. So it’s just ‘alright, alright, alright!’ There’s no fourth ‘alright.’ I gotta pull into the top notch and pick up the fourth.”
And when he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in January for “Dallas Buyers Club,” he opened his speech with those very same words, closing it with his motto, “Just keep livin’.”
Just three years after “Dazed,” McConaughey was a bona fide movie star, having beaten out Brad Pitt, Val Kilmer, Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner for the lead in the John Grisham blockbuster “A Time to Kill.”
That year, 1996, he appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair twice. His laser-blue eyes and laconic sex appeal drew comparisons to Paul Newman, and in an era of grungy leading men who looked in need of a good delousing — Rourke, Depp, Hawke — McConaughey was a throwback, a confident Marlboro Man astride rangy actors agonizing over the fame they chased.
“No one I’ve handled has struck it this big this fast,” said Pat Kingsley, his publicist at the time. “I felt like I was on a runaway train . . . the press viewed him as the Second Coming.”
He was on the short list for “Titanic” but lost the lead to Leonardo DiCaprio (also nominated for Best Actor for “Wolf of Wall Street,” in which McConaughey has a small role).
McConaughey then worked on prestige pictures such as “Contact” and “Amistad,” but nothing about those performances stuck.
“The studios offered me fewer dramas,” McConaughey said in 2012. “Truth is, I was in a colder part of my career at the time.”
So when he was offered the lead the 2001 rom-com “The Wedding Planner,” opposite Jennifer Lopez, he took it. “And then, s–t,” he said. “It made a whole bunch of money, and they came back and offered me more.”
McConaughey spent the next decade making millions while his talent languished. There was “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” “Two for the Money,” “Failure to Launch,” “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” — generic titles, generic roles. He became a tabloid fixture, shot jogging shirtless on the beach with Lance Armstrong and Jake Gyllenhaal. He was the stoner freak show who road-tripped solo in an Airstream and slept underneath a dreamcatcher, the one who slurped up spilled Coke in a meeting with producer Brian Grazer, the one who became a parody of himself. He was an object of mockery.
“I heard this joke yesterday,” he said in 2008. “How do you know the seasons are changing? McConaughey’s put on a suit.”
He decided to take a moment.
McConaughey — who often talks to himself and later relays these conversations in the third person — asked his assistant to pull all his reviews; he was most interested in the negative ones.
“I sat down and said, ‘We’re gonna read every one of these,’ ” he said. “There was some really good constructive criticism. I’m like, ‘That’s what I would’ve said about that performance. You’re right.’ ”
That was back in 2009, when he decided to stop working altogether. He got married, had children (Levi, now 5, Vida, 4 and Livingston, 1), and sat down with his model wife, Camila Alves, and his agent, Jim Toth — who’s married to Reese Witherspoon — to rechart his career.
“The first move was saying no to things that were very similar to things I’d done,” McConaughey said. “So, I remember having a human moment with my wife where I said, ‘Look, things are going to dry up here for a while. But the rent’s paid for, the kids are going to be able to eat. I’m going to get antsy, but when I get antsy, I’m going to need to be patient.’ I didn’t know how long that period was going to last.”
McConaughey went about two years without work. His grand plan, it turned out, could be boiled down to one decision: Go after only those roles that moved him, challenged him, scared him.
McConaughey cites two turning points in his life: the death of his father — while having sex with McConaughey’s mother, a detail the family freely shares — and the birth of his first child.
“I remember thinking OK, my career’s going well, I’m enjoying it, but my real life — the adventures, the excitement, and the vitality . . . was just so much more,” he told “Inside the Actor’s Studio” last week. “Loving more, more mad, more sad, laughing louder. And I was like, you know what, let me just recalibrate.”
McConaughey began his career transformation with 2011’s “The Lincoln Lawyer,” in which he played a morally elastic attorney operating out of the back seat of a Lincoln Continental. The role, pulpy yet sharp, allowed McConaughey to deploy his abundant charisma while easing audiences into his darker places.
“He just nailed it,” says producer Steindorff. “He approaches his work like an Olympic athlete — he puts everything into it. He wants to expose and explore [different] parts of himself.”
“That started it, for sure,” McConaughey said. He followed it up with the lead in a beautiful indie called “Mud” and a small role in Steven Soderbergh’s “Magic Mike” as Dallas, an aging, pathetic, greased-up stripper. It allowed McConaughey to mock his own persona while transcending it, winning him critical acclaim in the process.
He kept on the path, turning down $15 million to star in a feature-film reboot of “Magnum, P.I.” Instead, McConaughey went full-on psychopath in 2011’s “Killer Joe.”
“He is the hardest-working actor I’ve ever worked with,” says producer Scott Einbinder. “I remember the first screening of ‘Killer Joe’ — people were blown away by him, that he could be so dark. But he ate it up.”
“I’ve heard big-name directors complain about him: ‘Oh, he overthinks, he asks too many questions,’ ” says Linklater. “If that’s what you want, don’t get Matthew.”
It’s his work in “Dallas Buyers Club,” though, that has elevated McConaughey to a rarefied sphere. The film is based on the life of Ron Woodroof, a Texas man who in 1986 was diagnosed with AIDS and given 30 days to live; Woodroof fought the medical establishment and lived for another seven years.
To prepare, McConaughey — who was paid just $200,000 — stayed indoors for weeks, cultivating a sickly pallor, and shed 45 pounds off his 5-foot-11 frame. He approached Woodroof’s family, who gave him Woodroof’s journal.
“Going to his family was my secret weapon,” he said. “His family opened up their home, scrapbooks, everything about Ron.”
These two most recent performances have won him the greatest reviews of his career. He’s considered a lock for an Emmy for “True Detective,” and he has already won the Globe, the SAG Award and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for “Buyers Club.”
And really, he should win the Oscar just so we can hear the speech. At this year’s SAGs, he didn’t disappoint:
“When you’re seeing the character from the inside out, when you’re walking out every day and everything you see and smell and touch and observe is coming through that character, and it’s making sense, and you’re the subject, you’re the eye, you’re first person seeing it — that doesn’t always happen — but boy when it does, it feels like they could put a blindfold on you and put you in a spaceship and take you to Neptune and you could hop off on the planet — and they better have the sprockets rolling when you get off that spaceship because you are going to behave as your man,” he said. “That is a glorious feeling.”