The female co-star who intimidated Matthew McConaughey: “No bullshit”
Matthew McConaughey doesn’t seem like the type of guy who would be easily intimidated. He emanates the kind of laid-back, easy-breezy calm of a zen master, and his personal catchphrase, “alright-alright-alright”, doubles down on that unflappable good-time persona. Is it schtick? We’ll probably never know, but in an era of smartphones, there has been precious little documentation to suggest otherwise.
For a while, that easy charm made him the perfect fit for the latter-day rom-com. Following the golden age of the late 1980s and early ‘90s, the genre gave way to what people like to dismissively call chick flicks. Whether he was paired with Kate Hudson, Sarah Jessica Parker, or Jennifer Lopez, he channelled that smooth charisma into characters who never managed to grow up, and while the formula worked for a while, he, not surprisingly, grew out of it pretty quickly.
Much has been made of the McCaunnaisance, the period in which the actor leapt from Ghosts of Girlfriends Past to his Oscar-winning role in Dallas Buyers Club. However, that tidy narrative of a laid-back rom-com prince with unexplored potential who finally got to sink his teeth into a role leaves out the entire first decade of his career. Following his memorable turn as a sleazy 20-something in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused in 1993, McConaughey played a wide range of roles in movies that spanned the genre spectrum.
One of them was the role of a young religious philosopher in the 1997 science fiction drama Contact. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, the film starred Jodie Foster as a scientist who discovers evidence of extraterrestrial life through radio signals. She meets McConaughey’s character early on and has a brief romance with him. However, their outlook on spirituality differs considerably. She is a scientist, and he is a theologian, and they connect over their philosophical divergence.
Foster had already won two Oscars at that point and was a titan in Hollywood despite only being in her early thirties, and McConaughey instantly recognised that she wielded a special kind of power that had nothing to do with her many accolades. “Jodie is nobody’s fool,” he said in an interview with Vulture in 2022. “She’s very direct. I got to know her well enough to know she has a really great sense of humour, but Jodie is no bullshit.”
By that point, Foster had demonstrated for decades that she was working off her own playbook in Hollywood. After bursting onto the scene in her early teenage years with her role in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, she took on a series of experimental and off-the-wall jobs before hitting her stride as a major star with movies like The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs, both of which earned her Oscars.
McConaughey might have seen her at her most genuine because Foster would later say that her character in Contact was the closest to her true personality as any character before or since. “I think, more than any character that I’ve ever played, Ellie Arroway is the most like me — or at least the most like how I think I should be seen,” she said, explaining that the scientist was deeply emotional and highly intellectual, leaving her to lead a mostly solitary existence.
It was an interesting dynamic between Foster and McConaughey’s characters. She was the star of the film, while McConaughey was very much a supporting player. His role was mainly there to support and help Ellie grow, which, as the actor noted, was pretty unusual. “He did kind of have the ‘girl’s part,’” Foster reflected. “And I think that was refreshing, honestly, for him.” The result was two excellent performances that should have keyed casting directors in on the fact that McConaughey had much more potential than the following decade would suggest.
