The one movie Matthew McConaughey will always regret turning down: “I would have liked to be part of that”
Regrets can be a dangerous thing, especially if you hold onto them for too long, so it’s just as well that there’s only one movie Matthew McConaughey turned down that, in retrospect, he wishes he’d starred in. As an Academy Award-winning modern classic, that’s completely fair.
There are things he has and hasn’t done that the resurgent actor would have liked to see turn out a different way, though, whether it was chasing the money for too long and becoming better known for a slew of shirtless rom-coms than anything that tested his dramatic chops, or asking Marvel if he could play the lead character in a movie about the Hulk and being told no.
The post-McConaissance version of the laid-back Texan isn’t driven by money or awards season recognition these days; he’s in a position where he can make the films he wants to make, and he’s rich enough to be selective while also being versatile enough to play almost any kind of character, as long as it doesn’t require him to attempt any accent other than his own.
He’s only played four major live-action roles in the last decade, underlining that new approach to his career. Every actor has a part they’ll always rue as the one that got away, though, and in McConaughey’s case, it was Guy Pearce’s star-making turn as Bud Exley in Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential.
1997 was a strange year for the actor, all things considered; he took second billing in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad and Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, which saw him working with two of the biggest directors in the business. That said, both of those pictures underperformed, which can’t be said of the other two he flirted with.
As well as rejecting LA Confidential, which recouped its budget more than four times over at the box office and won two Oscars from ten nominations, he unsuccessfully auditioned for James Cameron’s Titanic, which claimed pretty much all the rest of the major prizes and became the biggest movie of all time.
“That was the closest one,” McConaughey confessed to Howard Stern, still toeing the party line that he’s not one to dwell on past mistakes. “I saw the movie, and I was like, ‘I would have really liked to be a part of that.'” He blamed his breakout turn in A Time to Kill for his decision, explaining that once the legal drama opened big in cinemas, he was suddenly inundated with scripts for the first time in his career.
As a result, he had to turn most of them down, and on paper, opting for Spielberg and Zemeckis over Hanson, who’d made his name as a solid-if-unspectacular hand on films including The River Wild, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Bad Influence seemed like the safer and more exciting bet.
McConaughey probably wouldn’t hop into a time machine, tell the aforementioned pair to stick their offers up their arse, and steal Pearce’s big break away from him if he could, but had he starred in LA Confidential, it could have sent both of their careers in completely different directions.
