The Wedding Planner. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Failure to Launch. And on and on. All of these made Matthew McConaughey one of the go-to rom-com stars of the 2000s. But to him, they just weren’t giving him the romantic feel that drew him to Hollywood, nor were they giving him something to laugh back. So when it came time, McConaughey was ready to reassess his career and leave those girlfriends in the past.
Matthew McConaughey recently sat down with The Guardian, where he opened up about his move to ditch rom-coms so he could find more meaning in his work. “I was good at something I wasn’t loving. I was never looking in the mirror going: ‘My life’s more vital than my work, oh I wish my work was as vital as my life.’ I remember going: ‘Well good luck, because if it’s got to be one way or the other, good on you that you feel your life’s more vital than your work and that it’s not the other way around.’ But I was like, ‘I want to go for it, I want to see if my work can be an experience for me that is so vital and alive that it challenges the vitality I’m having in my own life.’”
And while Matthew McConaughey and his wife were confident in the decision for him to leave rom-coms for good – especially before he could age out of them – it wasn’t met with fanfare from his entirely family. “My brothers were like: ‘Little brother, what is your major mal-f*cking-function? What are you thinking?’ And I was like: ‘No, this is clear to me and Camila, we’re going to do this. We’re not going to pull parachute. We’re gonna ride this.’ And 20 months later, the levee broke and the offers came in that I wanted.”
After 2009’s Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Matthew McConaughey was officially out of the rom-com game, soon landing fare like legal drama The Lincoln Lawyer, Mud for Jeff Nichols and Dallas Buyers Club, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar. So, yeah, it sounds like McConaughey’s brothers were the ones with the malfunction…McConaughey can next be seen in Paul Greengrass’ The Lost Bus, based on the true story of the 2018 Camp Fire.
What do you make of Matthew McConaughey’s career following leaving rom-coms? What has been his strongest performance since?
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