The role that made Matthew McConaughey “a happy man”
Following the decision to leave behind the romantic comedies that has been such a lucrative source of revenue throughout the 2000s, Matthew McConaughey embarked on his “McConnaissance” and began taking up roles that he actually wanted to play, serving up some of the greatest performances in recent memories.
Amongst those roles were The Lincoln Lawyer, Ron Woodroof, a homophobic cowboy with AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club, which saw McConaughey adorned with an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’, a father tasked with saving the world in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and an old guard stockbroker in The Wolf of Wall Street.
However, perhaps the finest of those 2010s performances came in HBO’s crime series True Detective, created by Nic Pizzolatto, in which McConaughey played the philosophical homicide detective Rust Cohle. Rust suffered previous trauma, which made him sceptical and inquisitive about just about everything. He truly was one of McConaughey’s best-ever performances.
In an interview on The Rich Eisen Show, McConaughey was asked whether he would ever like to revisit the character and explore any questions that remained unanswered. He responded, “Yeah, I would; I miss Rust Cohle. I miss watching him on Sunday nights. I miss watching True Detective on Sunday nights.”
He added, “I was a happy man while we made that for six months because I was on my own island. Luckily my wife put up with me. She said I was actually pretty nice when I came home. But I’d speak to Nick about it. It would have to be the right context.” Of course, things have likely moved on too far for us to ever see Rust return to the screen, but one can hope.
In the interview, McConaughey also opened up on the show’s interrogation of Rust Cohle scene, in which Rust is older and brought in for questioning. “We shot that in a day, 28 pages, and I just had to amalgamize it. We had seven different bubbles; I’d break them down. Get to know the dialogue first, then break it down to one sentence triggering a different thought.”
“I remember that day, we were in there for about 18 hours, and we shot about 24 pages. They were like, ‘Everybody, we are wiped. Can we go home?’ I was like, ‘No, we’re not going home. I’m finishing this. I’m in the belly of the beast. I’ll stay on’. We finished it late that night.” Which just goes to show the dedication McConaughey had to the role and explains why he found such inner satisfaction from it.
