“Since I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, I stopped doing what I was doing,” he says in a new episode of the ‘Good Trouble with Nick Kyrgios’ podcast.
There was a time when Matthew McConaughey was done saying all right, all right, all right to romantic comedies, and so he hightailed it to Texas instead.
The Oscar-winning actor opened up about the move and getting away from being “the rom-com dude” in the latest episode of Good Trouble with Nick Kyrgios, a video podcast series hosted by tennis maverick Nick Kyrgios.
“Look, man, the devil’s in the infinite yeses, not the no’s,” he told Kyrgios in an exclusive clip from the podcast, below, when the host asked what it means to the actor to always stay true to himself. “No, it’s just as important, if not more important. Especially if you have some level of success and access. No becomes more important than yes. Because, I mean, we all look around and see we’ve overleveraged our life with yeses and gone, geez, oh, man, I’m making C minuses and all that s— in my life because I said yes to too many things.”
McConaughey — known in his earlier career for being a king of the rom-com thanks to films like The Wedding Planner, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, Failure To Launch, Fool’s Gold, and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past — explained that many times in his life he’s realized he was on autopilot as a result of saying yes, and eventually had to say “nope, full stop, no.”
“When I was rolling off the rom-coms. And I was the rom-com dude, man,” McConaughey explained. “That was my lane, and I liked that lane. That lane paid well and it was working. But the lane was… I was so strong in that lane that anything outside of that lane, dramas and stuff that I wanted to do, were like, no, no, no, no, no McConaughey. Hollywood said no, no, no, no, you should stay there, stay there.”
He continued, “I didn’t want to. So, since I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, I stopped doing what I was doing. And I moved down to the ranch in Texas, and I went down there and I made a pact with my wife and said, ‘I’m not going back to work unless I get offered roles I want to do.'” He talked to his agent and that was that.
Paramount/ Everett
Matthew McConaughey in ‘How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days’
In addition to the move, he also turned down lucrative roles he might have been tempted to take previously, including an unnamed action comedy that he was given a $14.5 million offer to star in. “I think that was the one that was probably what was seen as the most rebellious move in Hollywood by me, because it really sent the signal, he ain’t f—ing bluffing,” McConaughey recalled of his shooting the role down. “And when you got someone who’s not bluffing, there’s something attractive about that. I think that’s what made Hollywood go, ‘You know what? He’s now a new novel idea. He’s a new bright idea.'”
It took a few “wobbly” years, but eventually, the gamble and move paid off, and the actor found himself in more dramatic parts in films such as Mud, Magic Mike, Interstellar, and the film he would win an Oscar for — Dallas Buyers Club.
And, it was all worth it: “When those offers came, I would salivate, man. And I just bit on and went back to back to back and worked as much as I could and loved it and felt every bit of it.”
