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HOLLYWOOD—Between meetings and incoming texts on his
BlackBerry one rainy afternoon in Los Angeles, Matthew
McConaughey tucked a discreet plug of tobacco behind his
lower lip and said of himself: “When I was a late
teenager, early 20s, just getting into this, I was like,
‘OK, to be something other than oneself is real acting
or better acting.’ Then I went, ‘Wait a minute.’ As I
started to study it and learn and to get to know it
more, I was like, ‘Real acting for me is more of a quest
to be more of myself in a character, to give up more of
who I am, how I feel inside.’
“I’ve
always said, ‘Keep the same heart, McConaughey. You can
change your mind for a character, but always keep your
same heart.’ Meaning, change your mind if you’re a
lieutenant in the Navy....Change your mind if you’re a
lawyer. Change your mind if you’re a surfer, change your
mind if you’re a treasure hunter. The last two are
Saturday characters, a lieutenant and a lawyer is a
Monday-morning character.”
For the
record, this was during a recent week of steady rain.
McConaughey was sitting in a van whose interior was
tricked out with love beads and which said, on the door
of the cab, “LP Ranch, Angus Cattle, Mertzon, Texas.” On
this miserable day, McConaughey was beefcake all bundled
up, although his chiseled face—the perfectly formed
jawline frosted with the outcroppings of a beard—stood
out beneath the watch cap pulled down to his blue eyes.
McConaughey calls the van Cosmo; he bought it more than
a decade ago. Cosmo had just come to pick him up at a
postproduction facility, where McConaughey gave some
notes on visual effects for his new movie, Surfer
Dude, which he’s also producing.
The
movie, for McConaughey, is a labor of love—shot over a
month last summer in Malibu on a budget of $6 million,
he said. In it, McConaughey plays a surfer whose
sponsorship gets bought out by a guy who wants to put
his surfers in reality shows and digitize their images.
McConaughey’s character, Steve Addington, just wants the
waves—to be out there “naturale.” So he quits and finds
himself in Malibu waiting out a bummer summer.
“It’s a
surfer flick about a guy who loves waves and he’s stuck
with ankle-slappers for a year,” McConaughey said, as
the van took him the short distance back to the offices
of j.k. livin, McConaughey’s production company. “This
script was just a flat-out comedy, Robb got ahold of it,
worked it into having something that had sort of, you
know, some very fun, quirky messages. It’s a very green
movie.”
Robb is
S.R. Bindler, the film’s first-time feature
writer-director, an old Texas friend whom McConaughey
said he met in high-school art class. Much about
McConaughey’s Hollywood operation feels, at first blush,
like the HBO series Entourage by way of Austin,
Texas. Gus Gustawes, McConaughey’s long-time manager,
and Gustawes’s brother Mark, head of production for j.k.
livin, are friends from McConaughey’s University of
Texas (UT) days.
They all
work out of a spacious, loftlike space steps from the
Venice boardwalk, having just relocated from land-locked
Beverly Hills.
“I have no ‘yes’ people around me,” McConaughey said. “I
can turn my back and everything’s A-OK. There’s not
gonna be any lyin’, cheatin’, stealin’ going on. There’s
not going to be any dishonesty.”
Rounding
out the team, in an advisory role, is the powerful
Creative Artist Agency partner Bryan Lourd. Lourd,
presumably, is the one who gets the movie star his
healthy quote to costar in movies such as Fool’s Gold,
a light-hearted adventure flick with Kate Hudson that
(opened in North America recently as the No. 1 film; it
opens around these parts next week—Ed.).
Asked
what his fee is these days, McConaughey said only, “I
can afford this van.”
It was
after the Surfer Dude meeting, when the van
brought him back to a lot near j.k. livin, that
McConaughey had agreed to talk about all things that
aren’t Surfer Dude. This was not a celebrity
interview conducted over linens in a hotel dining room,
the standard bargain, but something more McConaughey.
For the whole van setting reminded you of his very first
movie part, in Richard Linklater’s affecting 1993
high-school comedy Dazed and Confused.
McConaughey was a UT student at the time, discovered by
casting director Don Phillips in an Austin hotel bar.
First-timers don’t usually arrive onscreen so fully
formed. McConaughey was David Wooderson, a noxiously
sweet cad, with his porn-star mustache and Ted Nugent’s
Amboy Dukes T-shirt, trolling for underage girls in his
1970 Chevy, wooing them on a Saturday night in his
pot-addled Texas sing-song.
In the
15 years since Wooderson, McConaughey has resolved into
a Hollywood hunk starring in bankable romantic comedies
that have furthered his image as simpleton beefcake.
Such is McConaughey’s durability in these formula,
money-making ventures that he hasn’t had to bother
changing his accent, despite playing a slick New York ad
man (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) or a San
Francisco pediatrician (The Wedding Planner).
Failure to Launch (where he played opposite Sarah
Jessica Parker) ended up grossing more than $100 million
worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo, continued proof
that McConaughey can move tickets as a ladies’ man.
“He’s
very shrewd about himself,” said Scott Rudin, who
produced Failure to Launch. In the movie, Parker
plays a kind of life/relationship coach hired by
McConaughey’s parents to get their son to grow up and
move out, finally. Of course, the two fall in love.
Rudin
found McConaughey very instinctual about what audiences
wanted to see him do, the situations in which his
character would work best. “He’s very unsentimental
about it,” Rudin said. “It’s not calculating, it’s
knowing.”
Failure
to Launch
was a battle-of-wits comedy, but the power dynamic was
tipped toward Parker’s character. McConaughey’s comedies
are typically about the female leads. In this way, he
has become a throwback to the old studio-system days in
Hollywood,
when actors like Tyrone Power, Melvyn Douglas or Ray
Milland functioned as handsome, credible support for
their leading ladies, said Jeanine Basinger, chairman of
the Film Studies program at
Wesleyan
University,
whose latest book, The Star Machine, examines how stars
were manufactured.
“He’s
been willing to surrender himself to image, and most
movie stars of today are trying not to do that,” she
said of McConaughey.
“We’re
in a phase where the romantic comedy is more about the
women being able to choose and be in charge. He fits
with the time where a sort of good-looking,
mindless-appearing actor works in a lot of comedies,”
Basinger said.
Indeed,
it is difficult to come up with anyone who compares in
this microcategory. Keanu Reeves, say, is equated with
The Matrix movies, while Hugh Grant lazes through the
role as a sheepish Brit. McConaughey, by contrast, is
all-American, even wholesome.
If
McConaughey has reservations about all this, he didn’t
betray them. Nor does he see his oeuvre as
one-dimensional, or Fool’s Gold as just another comedy.
Fool’s
Gold reunites McConaughey with
Hudson,
his costar in 2003’s How to Lose a Guy.
McConaughey plays Finn, a high-seas, lower-IQ treasure
hunter.
Hudson
is his wife and fellow adventurer (the actress did not
respond to an interview request for this article). Hers
is easily the more evolved character. When the movie
opens she’s filing for divorce. “You married a guy for
the sex, and then expected him to be smart,” says her
lawyer.
For a
movie star with a quote in the millions, McConaughey
over his career has never been a superhero. He has never
saved the world, solved a murder, grieved a wife or died
onscreen. He did set a black man free as a Mississippi
defense lawyer in 1995’s A Time to Kill, Joel
Schumacher’s adaptation of the John Grisham novel about
the ugly remnants of the Jim Crow South.
The
movie represented McConaughey’s second huge break, the
one that was supposed to take him into Tom Cruise
territory. But then came McConaughey in Amistad,
and Contact, and U-571, and by the end of
this run it was easy to wonder where the joy of
Wooderson had gone.
Which is
why it seems, finally, that McConaughey’s career has
been put right, in profitable but harmless projects like
Fool’s Gold.
A
popular video on YouTube has Matt Damon doing his
McConaughey impression on The Late Show With David
Letterman. Stephen Colbert has twice used
“McConaughey” as his word of the night on The Colbert
Report.
“With
this cover you have made him a target for our nation’s
hottest bachelorettes,” Colbert scolded People in 2005,
after McConaughey scored its Sexiest Man title. “But
don’t do it, Matthew! If you ever entered a committed,
loving relationship, who else on People magazine’s list
of sexiest bachelors are women supposed to turn to? Zach
Braff?”
“I’m not
working it,” McConaughey said, asked how much of this
image he exploits.
There
is, for instance, the matter of his abs and chest—often
unadorned for all the world to see, on screen and off.
It is remarkable, in fact, how many people associate
McConaughey with his shirtless self, like Groucho with
his cigar.
McConaughey deemed it the paparazzi-fueled result of his
having spent three straight summers on a beach—in
Malibu,
in Australia, and then Malibu again. “What I’m not gonna
do is see someone on the beach taking pictures, and go,
oh, well I’m not gonna go on the beach anymore,” he
said.
During
the interview, McConaughey got a call from his
girlfriend, Brazilian model Camila Alves, 24; the couple
recently announced that she is pregnant.
“Saw her
across the room at a restaurant,” McConaughey said when
they’d hung up. “Invited her over, got the ingredients
for a good margarita and made her a great one, and we
talked Spanish and Portuguese for the first 25 minutes.”
That was
nearly two years ago. On his web site (www.matthewmcconaughey.com),
McConaughey posted a journal entry announcing the
pregnancy, describing himself as “stoked and wowed by
this gift of creation and this miracle of God.”
The web
site is a window into the duality of his persona, of how
much the two have coalesced. It opens to an image of a
glamorized McConaughey in the glare of paparazzi before
dissolving to Wooderson, standing there posed with a
pool cue. Behind him is the trailer McConaughey is
living out of before moving into a Malibu house. A
reggae song plays, by a band called Mishka, whose first
album McConaughey’s company is releasing.
A link
gives you two options: You can enter “easy,” or “real
easy.” |
