The moment Matthew McConaughey knew to leave rom-coms behind
The acting career of Matthew McConaughey comes in several different waves. By now, we know him for his excellent performances of the 2010s after he moved away from the rom-coms of the 2000s. McConaughey’s career started well, with roles in Richard Linklaters’ Dazed and Confused and the legal drama A Time To Kill, both released in the 1990s.
However, after performing in Adam Shankman’s 2001 romantic comedy The Wedding Planner, the movie world began to perceive McConaughey in a different light. He was suddenly the prime choice to star in films in the genre and generally woo a female audience by taking his top off and running along the beach in slow motion.
Several romantic comedies followed throughout the 2000s, including How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch, Fool’s Good and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Of course, these films established the Texas-born actor as a 21st Century sex symbol and made his bank balance swell rather generously.
However, McConaughey always had bigger dreams in terms of being an actor than just playing the leading man in rom-coms. Looking back on that period of his life, McConaughey told Rolling Stone in 2020, “After four or so rom-coms, you could send me a rom-com tonight, and I could do it tomorrow morning. I wanted to find some work that made me sweat in my boots.”
Evidently, McConaughey had been typecast, and he began to feel a hatred for the carbon copy genre in sum. The result was McConaughey taking two years out of the film industry. The offers for rom-coms kept coming, but he continuously turned them down, even when the offer was for around $15million for just two months of work.
Eventually, this move paid off, though, beginning with 2011’s The Lincoln Lawyer. Finally, McConaughey was back in a role he actually wanted to perform in. The legal drama resulted in offers for more dramatic roles, and his next earned him the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’. It was Dallas Buyers Club and is certainly one of the great performances of the last ten years.
McConaughey didn’t rest on his laurels, however. He followed up again in 2014 with one of the best-ever TV shows, True Detective, in which he played the philosophical and trouble investigator Rust Cohle, which will surely go down as one of McConaughey’s greatest-ever performances.
Following a lead role in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, the ‘McConnaissance’ was completed, and the actor had successfully navigated the journey from the rom-coms he had begun to despise to becoming one of the most admired actors of his generation, and this time, it was for more than just his good looks.
