The co-star Sandra Bullock thought was in a league of his own: “There’s nobody like him”
Being indescribable can be both a blessing and a curse for an actor, even if the star Sandra Bullock couldn’t find the words to comprehend doesn’t immediately jump out as somebody who’s constantly shown themselves to be unquantifiable.
A performer who either becomes very good or incredibly well-known for one thing tends to fall victim to typecasting, while those who don’t master anything will invariably find themselves overlooked for the biggest and juiciest parts. As simple and obvious as it may seem, actors are a lot easier to sell when they’ve got a selling point.
Ironically, the subject of Bullock’s struggles ended up being forced to reinvent their entire career after becoming too closely associated with a certain style of cinema. Having headlined at least one rom-com too many and spent too much time parading around the screen with his shirt off, Matthew McConaughey needed freshening up.
To do so, he decided to try actually acting again, which paid off handsomely when the McConnaisance led him from the light and fluffy doldrums of doe-eyed romance to an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’. He’d originally broken through as a prodigiously talented rising star, only for those pesky good looks to drag him into a comfort zone of his own making.
He encountered Bullock shooting Joel Schumacher’s star-studded John Grisham adaptation A Time to Kill, the hit legal drama Samuel L Jackson is adamant he should have won an Oscar for. Playing idealistic lawyer Jake Brigance and assisting law student Ellen Roark, respectively, the pair held their own against a formidable ensemble.
It was one of McConaughey’s first major leading roles, and coupled with subsequent performances in Contact and Amistad, his pre-rom-com era was going swimmingly. Even though the two ended up in a relationship that started during production, Bullock still couldn’t quite figure out how to boil her opposite number down to his essence.
Part of McConaughey’s appeal was that he resisted the neat labels Hollywood often likes to assign its leading men. He possessed the effortless charisma of a traditional movie star, but there was also an unpredictability to his personality that prevented him from feeling overly polished. Whether on set or in interviews, he projected an easy-going confidence that seemed entirely natural rather than carefully cultivated.
That combination made him especially memorable to the people who worked alongside him. While audiences were often captivated by his screen presence, colleagues tended to speak about his off-camera energy, describing someone whose humour, curiosity and eccentric streak were every bit as distinctive as his performances.
“Matthew just had a spark to him,” she told Rolling Stone. “He gets a joke that nobody else gets, has a rhythm to himself. Ask me to describe him. I can’t even begin to pull enough people together. Take a little Will Rogers, a little Paul Newman and then some bizarre character actor, some totally whacked nut case like Boxcar Willie. And then you take a six-year-old, and you mesh that all together; that’s kind of close. But there’s nobody like him.”
Those Newman comparisons were often made during his initial climb up the ladder, but vaudeville legend Rogers? Not so much. Defiantly old-fashioned country musician and fellow Texan, Boxcar Willie, came out of left field, and so did a six-year-old kid. It’s an unusual way to try and sum somebody up, but clearly, Bullock couldn’t find the words to describe the enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a very handsome man that was McConaughey.
