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In all his homespun wisdom, Matthew McConaughey doesn’t think the world is a stage — he thinks it’s a story told by the fire.
“Am I doing things that I want to last? Yeah. Am I trying to build bonfires instead of just
campfires? Yeah,” the Oscar-winner says, reflecting on his legacy before he’s honored with Variety’s Legend & Groundbreaker Award at Filmland in Arkansas on Friday.
Over the last 30 years, he’s tended the flames at the multiplex (from “Dazed and Confused” and “Mud” to “Interstellar” and “Dallas Buyers Club”), on the small screen (his Emmy-nominated turn in “True Detective”), with his Just Keep Livin’ foundation for high schoolers and as a professor at his alma mater, the University of Texas. But his biggest bonfire? He and his wife Camila Alves McConaughey’s children: Levi, 18, Vida, 16, and Livingston, 13.
“When you have children, that’s the literal form of becoming immortal. They live on, and how much of you can they carry forward,” McConaughey says, breaking into his famous laugh before launching into another metaphor.
“Hopefully all these things I’m doing are useful,” he says. “Hopefully, they’re enjoyable to do as well. I like it when the broccoli tastes like candy. It’s nice when something tastes really good and is good for you. That’s the kind of honey hole I’m shooting for, you know?”
With each role McConaughey chooses to tackle, he keeps those fires burning. He’s calling from Italy, where he just wrapped filming on Netflix’s “Positano,” a slick international caper starring fellow Oscar winner Zoe Saldaña as a rival thief. As a lover of jewel-heist movies, the actor says the script aligned with his creative instincts — plus filming along the Amalfi Coast felt like a “working vacation.”
“The tone of the script should feel like you’re dancing across the sunset,” he says, describing the film. “Mind you, it’s a lot of hours, hard work, but just to play a high-end grifter, I like that world.”
After soaking up the last few days of Euro summer, McConaughey will head back stateside to promote Black Bear’s “The Rivals of Amziah King,” and the Apple TV comedy series “Brothers,” which reunites him with close friend and “True Detective” co-star Woody Harrelson. The eight-episode series, which begins streaming Sept. 23, sees the pair play fictionalized versions of themselves, whose friendship is thrown into chaos when they learn they might actually be brothers. And while “Brothers” is a rollicking good time, “The Rivals of Amziah King” is the type of lo-fi local lore that sparks McConaughey’s artistic fires.
“‘Amziah’ was the most particular original place, time, space and character I’d read in a long time,” he says about the indie pic from writer-director Andrew Patterson.
In it, he plays the title character — a beekeeper, bluegrass musician and pillar of his rural Oklahoma community who reunites with his former foster daughter, Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), and fends off threats to his honey business.
“I’ve never played in a bluegrass band in the middle of the gravel parking lot. But I just know these people,” the native Texan says. “I know this humor — and the way that humor heals. The way that you bring in misfits and you give them a place of belonging. As long as you’re honest about who you are, we don’t give a damn.”
Above all, McConaughey was attracted to the story’s innocence. It’s a “love story for the underdogs,” he explains. “And at the head of it, this guy Amziah — this legend of a man, who’s a father, a leader of misfits, a giver of belonging — helps shepherd this young woman, a princess, into becoming a queen.”
“The Rivals of Amziah King” debuted to a rare standing ovation at SXSW last March and will be released in limited theaters beginning Friday. Among the theaters showing the pic will be the Matthew McConaughey Cinema, the newly renamed Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin, where he lives.
When McConaughey looks out at the students in his “Script to Screen” class at the U. of Texas, he can see his younger self among them. “Part of the reason I started the class was it’s the class that after I graduated, went off and started a career, that I wish I would have offered,” he says.
When he was in film school in the early ’90s, the art of moviemaking was treated like a literary endeavor. “I thought whatever was in the script, you have to shoot exactly that,” he explains. “While that may be somebody’s taste, it can keep you from seeing magic and letting life happen.”
While it took McConaughey making 50 movies to come to the freeing realization that each film was at least a little different from the original script, he thought younger performers could benefit from learning that at the beginning of their careers. “You can take pressure off these students and go, ‘Let it breathe. It’s a piece of living art. Let it become what it wants to be or what it becomes.’”
As a professor, McConaughey encourages experiential learning. His philosophy: “Try it now. Shoot it. Quit talking about it.” He can still remember that fear of “doing something shitty,” but he looks at it differently now. “I look back and go, ‘Man, I wish you’d have done more shitty things earlier. I wish you would’ve screwed up more and been embarrassed and tried it again.’”
It doesn’t take much for McConaughey to conjure memories of his early days in the entertainment business, like his breakout role in Richard Linklater’s 1993 cult classic “Dazed and Confused.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew what I was doing,” McConaughey says about stepping on set. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I damn sure had instincts for it. And I try to keep those instincts well-oiled because I’ve learned a lot more since.”
McConaughey’s portrayal of Wooderson, a smooth-talking slacker who graduated long ago, yet still rolls with high schoolers, certainly doesn’t fall into the category of “doing something shitty.” Instead, he birthed an iconic character with the improvised catchphrase, “Alright, alright, alright.” Making the movie is still one of the highlights of his career.
“There couldn’t have been a better example of a collaborative experience,” McConaughey says. “People working together, other actors handing me lines in the middle of scenes, Linklater inviting me into scenes that I was never written into. I mean the graciousness was through the roof. I’ve never been on a more generous set since.”
McConaughey has just as clear a memory of his first time as a leading man, starring with Sandra Bullock and Samuel L. Jackson in the 1996 courtroom drama, “A Time to Kill.” It was a big role, but he wasn’t going to let that get to him.
“Was I conscious that I was in the lead of a major Warner Bros. John Grisham novel picture that could be quite popular? Maybe,” he says. “But I was never objective in that way. I was never hopping outside [myself] going, ‘You might have a hit on your hands. Oh, you might be a movie star.’ No, no, no, no. I was just heads down. Acting is a subjective experience.”
What advice would he give that young actor — before the run of hit romantic comedies (“How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” “The Wedding Planner,” “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”) or the indie-film-driven “McConaissance” in the 2010s (“The Lincoln Lawyer,” “Killer Joe,” “Mud,” “Magic Mike”)?
“Have reverence for your job. Do that job well, and you’ve got your best chance of something succeeding,” McConaughey says.
There are no guarantees, of course. “You can give good performances in crappy stories. But if you can take care of yourself, you can help the story out,” he adds, chuckling. “Then you hope the stuff translates. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they don’t, but they do 20 years later.”
Such was the case with Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic “Interstellar,” which is better appreciated today than when it hit theaters in 2014. “The 10-year anniversary of ‘Interstellar’ was like the movie had just been released,” he says. “The people that come up to me, 95% of it is [to talk about] ‘Interstellar.’”
Outside of acting, McConaughey is dedicated to setting the next generation up for success. In 2008, he and Camila founded the Just Keep Livin’ Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps students at inner-city high schools through free after-school programs focused on fitness, healthy eating and mental wellness. The foundation is designed to be the team for the people without a team.
“When you see somebody who, in the ninth grade, was failing school, into drugs, and they come to our foundation class because it gives them a sense of belonging, and all of a sudden, they graduate four years later, and they’re the valedictorian, and they’ve got a scholarship to UCLA, or somewhere, you go, ‘Whoa!” McConaughey says.
“Now, did we have everything to do that? No,” he continues. “But boy, did we have something to do with that young person changing their patterns and seeking to learn a better way of choosing things to do in life that could pay them back? Yeah. And, ooh, that feels good.”
He gets the same satisfaction from watching his own kids grow into themselves, too, both as people and as budding artists. (Last year, McConaughey shared the screen with his son, Levi, in Apple TV’s “The Last Bus.”)
“It is an artistic endeavor to grow into a confident individual who believes in themselves,” McConaughey points out before launching into his parenting philosophy.
“Camila and I are trying to teach them and show them and put things in front of them that help them find what hopefully they, one, love to do, but, secondly, are inherently gifted to do,” he explains. “Because we live in a capitalist society, and if there is a demand for that which you can supply, well, that might be a good way to pay your bills. But to do that with character.”
Spoken like a true legend.
