by Neil Daniels
‘In starting a family, you really start thinking about community,’ McConaughey explained to Brenda Rodriguez of People magazine. ‘We’re teaching them about nutrition and about those choices that they make.’
McConaughey is known for his taste in casual clothes and has often been photographed wearing khakis and flip-flops. In fact, since an incident in June 2008, he was known as the flip-flop guy after he got drunk at a beachfront bar in Nicaragua and asked the locals to help him look for his lost flip-flop, which he’d had for eleven years. It made celebrity press headlines. A statement was issued to the press describing his love of flip-flops.
‘I like to be able to wear something that is appropriate for wherever the day takes me: to work, on a hike and then out to dinner,’ he explained to WWD. ‘I like to take the formality out of the day’s schedule and be ready for any off-road detour. One of the first things I had written down was “from the jungle to the opera”. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but that’s the idea.’
It’s clear that McConaughey has vested interests outside of the world of film and acting. His company has stakes in music, fashion and charity work. He is a cultured man, someone who loves to travel – a man who is interested in the world, in absorbing new cultures.
‘The best education I’ve had in my life has been to travel,’ McConaughey admitted to Shadows On The Wall’s Rich Cline. ‘And I get to do that with this job, so my kids will fill up their passport as soon as possible. They’ll travel to every film set with me.
‘I guess, if my children inherit anything from me, it would be loyalty,’ he added. ‘I’m a loyal guy. One thing we knew growing up was that mom and dad loved us even when we were getting our butts whooped. And we learned to respect our elders too. And to never say the words C-A-N-T or H-A-T-E.’
McConaughey is also interested in developing himself as a person; he is constantly striving to be a better individual. His enthusiasm for life, people and the world around him has surely impacted on his recent spate of superlative work. How could it not? He has a happy home life and a flourishing career. Having worked with such revered auteurs as Spielberg, Zemeckis and Soderbergh, it was then that a certain Italian-American director came a-calling.
*****
McConaughey’s next role was Mark Hanna in The Wolf of Wall Street, a film directed by Martin Scorsese, about a New York stockbroker who manages a firm that involves itself in securities fraud and corruption on Wall Street in the 1990s. Hanna is Jordan Belfort’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) boss and encourages him to adapt a hedonistic lifestyle of sex and drugs. The film was marketed as a DiCaprio film and McConaughey had a small but significant supporting role in the first third of the film.
McConaughey told Rolling Stone’s Charles Thorp that working with Scorsese was ‘quite musical’. He explained further: ‘In my mind, the perfect set is when everybody is free enough, creatively, to steal from one another. Even better, when you steal from someone and then you give it back to them in the scene. I stole some things from Leo – he told me a joke when we first met and I stole it. That whole “fugazi” bit. He told me about it, and I said, “I’m going to mispronounce that for the fun of it.” Everybody is always talking about that scene, and I made that decision just seconds before we shot it.’
Martin Scorsese is one of the most admired directors in American cinema with a string of highly-praised films to his name, from his 1970s work such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver to Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ in the 1980s, Goodfellas and Casino in the 1990s and, more recently, The Departed and Shutter Island. If Scorsese comes calling, you pick up the phone.
McConaughey told MTV News: ‘I studied Martin Scorsese in film school in 1992, at the University of Texas. All of the sudden, a year and a half ago or two years ago, I’m going to meet Martin Scorsese at this apartment in New York. I was just nervous to meet an icon like that. And the first thing I got from him was, “This guy loves funny.” It occurred to me that most of the people who are great at what they do, they love funny.’
‘Matthew has a musical rhythm,’ Scorsese said to John Powers of Vogue. ‘It’s there in both his dialogue and his body language.’
His character has a scene where he beats his chest, which became one of the film’s most memorable moments. McConaughey was interviewed by the The Showbiz 411 about the origins of the chest beating. He said: ‘It’s something I do from time to time to relax myself before a scene, or to get my voice lower, and I’ll do it to whatever the rhythm of the character is in the scene. I was doing it before takes, and Leonardo [DiCaprio] had the idea of “Why don’t you put that in the scene?’ so I did.’
The cast also includes Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Favreau and Jean Dujardin. During filming McConaughey was still losing weight because of Dallas Buyers Club and Scorsese told him he couldn’t drop any more pounds. McConaughey looks very gaunt in the film, ill in fact, but cocaine and drugs were a major staple of eighties life on Wall Street so his weight loss was applicable to his character. The film is based on the best-selling book of the same name by disgraced investor Jordan Belfort.
‘Well, it feels great. I’m excited about it. I’m proud of the films I’ve been able to be in – from The Wolf of Wall Street to Mud to Dallas Buyers Club,’ McConaughey told the BBC’s Tim Masters.
The Wolf of Wall Street opened in US cinemas in December 2013 and in the UK in January 2014. Reviews of the film were very positive although it caused uproar –Scorsese is no stranger to controversy – with some more conservative viewers attacking it for its regular use of vulgarity, drugs, animals, sex and overall moral ambiguity.
‘There’s a lot of disgusting behaviour,’ McConaughey said to The Hollywood Reporter in reaction to the controversy surrounding the film. ‘We wanted this to be a cautionary tale… It was a reaction to what happened in 2008. It was a giant Hieronymus Bosch painting… Martin Scorsese has never been a director who spoon-feeds the audience what the ramifications of these actions are. He purposely didn’t cut away to the [victims].’
The film grossed more than $350 million at the box office and was nominated for five Academy Awards. It was acclaimed as Scorsese’s best film since Goodfellas, released in 1990.
The Observer’s Mark Kermode wrote: ‘None of which is to say that The Wolf of Wall Street does not have its pleasures, notably Jonah Hill in versatile post-Moneyball form as Belfort’s slimy sidekick Donnie Azoff, and a thin-faced, big-haired Matthew McConaughey teaching his protégé about the financial importance of masturbation.’
Writing in the Independent, Geoffrey MacNab said: ‘They’re in a sleek restaurant high above the city. Hanna (played with sly comic relish by McConaughey) is clearly intended as the devil-like figure, telling his young acolyte what rewards might be his if he follows the paths of corruption. The scene is echoed later on, when Belfort tries to bribe the FBI officer, contrasting the luxuries he enjoys on his yacht with the underpaid drudgery of the officer’s life.’
McConaughey’s co-star in Dallas Buyers Club, Jared Leto, praised McConaughey’s performance in The Wolf of Wall Street during a London press conference for the UK premiere of Dallas Buyers Club. Leto said: ‘By the way, I just saw it and holy shit I didn’t see Dallas Buyers Club but you must be pretty good in this one. You were so good in that movie!’
He added: ‘My first thought is that you were so damn good in that scene, he [Leo] saw you in that scene and thought shit I’m gonna step up, that’s my motivation!’
McConaughey responded: ‘When you go to work with people who are really good at what they do, you find out quickly that there’s really no secret magic trick that they have that’s different to anyone else but they do the simple things really really well and are confident enough to be free and open.’
The success and acclaim that greeted McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club overshadowed his small but important role in The Wolf of Wall Street. Nevertheless, it was another string to his bow, and having worked with such
masters as Spielberg, Howard, Friedkin, Soderbergh and Zemeckis, he can now tick Scorsese off the list of great living directors with whom he has performed. Actors don’t turn down the chance to work with such heavyweight directors regardless of what the projects are.
‘I’ve done a lot of work, over the last few years,’ McConaughey told Collider’s Christina Radish. ‘I was able to put some things out, and be in some things that I liked a lot, last year. We finished these things over a year ago, and now they’re still vital. We’re actually just now declaring them, and they’re having a brand-new life. Other things that I’ve done had a quicker shelf life. These things are feeling really relevant, and they’re piquing some people’s interests, and they’re resonating. I haven’t really thought about them as a year, and I haven’t thought, “Am I going to have another good year?” Part of it was that I haven’t really been looking in the rearview mirror for a while. I hope I don’t. It’s nice to talk about, but I’m in no way in a retrospective mode.’
The Wolf of Wall Street is not McConaughey’s sole enterprise with Martin Scorsese. The revered Italian-American filmmaker directed a much-publicised Dolce & Gabbana short film featuring Scarlett Johansson, titled Street of Dreams. The stylish black-and-white film is for the label’s new scent ‘The One’. The tale is about two ex-lovers who are reunited years later and, typically, Scorsese uses New York as a background. Stefano Gabbana expressed enthusiasm for McConaughey in a press statement: ‘Matthew is the ultimate charmer. He is an outstanding actor, and a very handsome man whose good looks seem to be increasing with age. And he has also been blessed with style, not to mention a clever wit and boundless charisma. There could be no other face for “The One for Men.”’
Some of McConaughey’s recent films have been about addiction and how dangerous addiction can be. ‘I know I can,’ he replied when asked by MovieWeb’s Evan ‘Mushy’ Jacobs if he has an addictive personality. ‘That just comes from me, if I’m doing something I do like to take it to the limit. I’ve got a high ceiling. A wide threshold for seeing what those boundaries are for myself. I’m very resilient inside. I find things that I like and do and boy, I do like to stick to them. I’m not necessarily a guy who gets addicted to more of certain things, but if I find something I like to do, I like to stick to it.’
McConaughey closed the year on an all-time high with two hugely popular films; both Dallas Buyers Club and The Wolf of Wall Street were making mega bucks and winning rave reviews from pundits. ‘When I first saw Wolf, I just got a whole new buzz on life,’ McConaughey enthused to Rolling Stone’s Charles Thorp. ‘I’m a part of American filmmaking history with that one. With Dallas Buyers Club, I was attached to it for five years before it happened. And not only was it a movie that was good medicine for our community, it’s also an entertaining movie. That doesn’t happen very often.’
One could hardly believe that Matthew McConaughey, the star of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Fool’s Gold and The Wedding Planner, was now being mentioned in the same breath as Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, two fine, high calibre actors whose talents live up to their good looks and celebrity appeal.
The years 2011 to 2013 were truly fantastic for the actor from Texas – both personally and professionally – but the success and good fortune did not end with release of The Wolf of Wall Street. Perhaps the greatest acclaim of his career was due in the New Year, and it was not on the big screen.
CHAPTER TEN
THE McCONAISSANCE
‘I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.’
Matthew McConaughey, Elle, 2013
‘My life outside my career is extremely enriching,’ McConaughey enthused to People magazine. ‘So I am letting that feed my work, and letting my work feed my life.’
Matthew McConaughey was now the comeback kid. His career was on a high and he loved every minute of it. In some respects it was similar to the path of actor Mickey Rourke, whose career had gone off the rails in the late 1990s. Rourke began to take smaller roles in the 2000s and then he got a starring role in the critically acclaimed film The Wrestler, directed by the much-respected Darren Aronofsky and released in 2008. Since the release of that film, Rourke has been cast in such major productions as Iron Man 2 and The Expendables. Similarly, Julia Roberts kick-started her career, which had been stuck in stale rom-coms and modest dramas, with 2000’s critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning Erin Brockovich, directed by Steven Soderbergh. All of a sudden, Julia Roberts was on fire and one of the most successful and high-earning actors in Hollywood.
‘His backstory is a lot like Sandra Bullock,’ said Tom O’Neil, founder of awards tracking site GoldDerby.com, to USA Today on McConaughey’s recent success. ‘Somebody who was known for making cheesy commercial movies of dubious quality, who hung in there year after year and maintained a career until suddenly they got the good movie roles and critics’ attention. Hollywood likes that. They like the survivor. And they like the happy ending.’
Acting in Hollywood has a very short shelf life. Ryan Reynolds faced a challenge after the action movie flop of R.I.P.D., so he signed up for some independent films, just as Taylor Kitsch faced challenges after the failures of both Battleship and John Carter, so he signed up for Lone Survivor and HBO’s adaptation of The Normal Heart. In a similar fashion to Matthew McConaughey, these actors knew that they needed to rebrand themselves in order to stay in the limelight and thus keep working. On the other hand Ben Affleck turned to directing after the failures of Gigi and Daredevil and came up trumps with Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo.
Talking about the change in his professional and personal life throughout the 2010s McConaughey explained to the Independent’s Lesley O’Toole: ‘Part of it is just growing up and part of it is I’m very turned on and excited about all kind of things. Probably more things now than I used to be. I work hard to maintain the good things in my life that I’ve built – friendships, work, family, my own time. Sometimes you’ve got to go, “Ah man, I haven’t seen my brother in three months.” But it feels really great when you can think: “Boy, all my relationships are good, people that I love are good, and my relationship with them is good. My career, I’m dialled, it feels good. Health is good.” But to maintain that, when things change, you’ve got to be nimble at times.’
‘It was a lot of romantic comedies and action films,’ McConaughey elaborated to Entertainment Weekly’s Jeff Labrecque. ‘I just said I feel like I’ve done a version of that before. Or I feel like I can do that tomorrow morning. And I think I’ve done enough of that for now, and I want something that I don’t think I can do tomorrow morning. I want something that scares me.’
*****
McConaughey was cast as Detective Rustin ‘Rust’ Cohle in the acclaimed HBO series True Detective. McConaughey had never played such an honest and bold character on screen as Cohle. His co-star Woody Harrelson was cast as his partner Detective Martin ‘Marty’ Hart. The rest of the main cast features Michelle Monaghan as Maggie Hart, Michael Potts as Detective Maynard Gilbough and Tory Kittles as Detective Thomas Papania.
True Detective was created by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. Its central premise concerns two vastly different Louisiana State Police homicide detectives who hunt a serial killer in Louisiana across seventeen years; the series uses multiple timelines across eight episodes.
The series premiered in the US on 12 January 2014 and on 22 February in the UK. He was back on the map. True Detective woke up the world and made people aware of McConaughey’s talents as a character actor. McConaughey did not watch the advance tapes but like the rest of the US he watched it on Sundays, week by week, as the story unfolded with nail-biting tension.
‘Matthew is a divisive figure in Hollywood,’ Harrelson said to GQ’s Jessica Pressler. ‘I have found myself defending him to people who don’t really know him, who for some reason feel very antagonistically toward him. He’s a good guy, he’s great-looking, has a perfect body, his c
areer’s through the roof.
‘People resented that, and the way they justified it is, “He has never done a movie of substance,”’ he continued. ‘They can’t say that anymore.’
Pizzolatto is the natural heir to NYPD Blue and Deadwood creator David Milch. Author of the excellent novel Gavelston and a former assistant professor of literature at DePauw University in Indiana, Pizzolatto has become one of the most respected writers in TV. Before True Detective his only produced scripts were a pair for the US remake of the hit Danish series The Killing. ‘I wanted to look at the relationship between these men and how it changed,’ declared Pizzolatto to The Guardian’s Sarah Hughes. ‘I wasn’t interested in doing what everyone else was doing. The point wasn’t to write another serial-killer show.’
There are a lot of non-verbal scenes in the film, which says as much about the relationship between the two detectives as the dialogue. Theirs is a tough relationship as Hart tries to understand Cohle. They are on very different planes of thought. Cohle’s reactions are often monk-like with little or no expression just dialogue, while Hart is easier to read but is still a troubled soul who betrays his wife with his extra-marital affairs and has anger management issues.
Both onscreen and off, the two lead stars clicked. They’d first met back on the set of EDtv in 1999 and subsequently hooked up on the long-forgotten movie Surfer, Dude. They try to meet as often as they can on a social level so it was great to collaborate again in front of the camera. There’s a lot of brotherly love between them, as well as mutual respect and admiration for each other’s talents.
‘Part of why Woody and I are friends,’ McConaughey reflected to Collider’s Christina Radish in 2014, ‘is that we get on each other’s frequency, and we affirm each other and one-up each other. It can turn into an improvisation, but it can go into the ether, and then some. I have a really big mag full of films [sic], but this is the first time we worked together where there’s real opposition. This was not about us coming together. Early on, I remember that we said, “Boy, we gotta put some kind of fun in this. This thing can be a lead weight.” We found a new sort of comedy, but it was not the comedy of the two-hander, where I pass it to him, and he passes it back. We were not playing catch, back and forth.’
