The “absurd” movie Matthew McConaughey refused to watch for over 20 years
Bad movies often emerge when there is a lack of passion or creativity from those involved, but the most memorable “so-bad-they’re-good” cult classics come to fruition when the intentions are sincere. As Matthew McConaughey learned, it sometimes takes a group of truly talented people to make an all-time disaster.
There aren’t many contemporary actors whose career fluctuations have been as well-documented as those of Matthew McConaughey. Despite being earmarked early on in his career thanks to collaborations with such beloved filmmakers as Steven Spielberg, Richard Linklater, Joel Schumacher, and Robert Zemeckis, McConaughey fell down a route when his films continued to underperform and receive negative reviews.
As he would later note in his own biography, McConaughey made an immediate decision to start taking his career more seriously by picking projects that he was actually passionate about. 2013 saw him giving a scene-stealing performance in The Wolf of Wall Street, returning to his roots for the independent drama Mud, and physically transforming to play the activist Ron Woodrough in Dallas Buyers Club, which won him the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’. Within the next year, McConaughey was front and centre on HBO’s True Detective and landed his biggest success ever with Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
Many would cite McConaughey’s appearances in forgettable romantic comedies like How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days, Fool’s Gold, and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past as what had threatened to doom his career, but some of his flops were even wilder. When it came to disastrous projects, McConaughey was so confused by Tiptoes that he couldn’t even bear to watch the trailer until twenty years after its release.
Written and directed by Matthew Bright, a talented filmmaker with decades of experience, Tiptoes is the story of McConaughey’s character Steven, who reveals to his fiancée Carol (Kate Beckinsale) that he is the only average-sized person in a family of dwarves. The trailer, which McConaughey was finally convinced to watch, was so absurd that many viewers had initially thought that it was a parody.
“It doesn’t look real, but damn, that’s a good trailer,” McConaughey said. “That goes for it.”
While McConaughey admitted that the film “wasn’t quite real, but it was real,” he did admit that he had been a bit too “straight-faced” for a project that was absurd. However, McConaughey did not throw his co-stars under the bus and defended the decision to invest time and effort into an unusual concept.
“Look, it was obviously a wild concept, but you see the talent it drew,” McConaughey said. “It was anarchic. It still had some heart to it, which I think maybe in the script felt less sentimental than that did. We knew it was a soap opera, but it felt so corny, like, ‘This is wild.’”
Tiptoes may have attracted some controversy for the casting of Gary Oldman, a non-dwarf actor, in the role of McConaughey’s younger brother, but the film was ultimately deemed too ridiculous to be legitimately offensive. However, even the most scathing of reviews were able to note that McConaughey wasn’t necessarily bad in the film, as he was only doing his best with the material that he was given. Perhaps the reason that directors like Martin Scorsese and Jeff Nichols took an interest in McConaughey was that he could elevate any project that he was in, regardless of its overall quality.
