By: debbie lynn elias
The only thing one ever need know when they see the name “Matthew McConaughey” on a movie’s titles or on the theater marquis is that his performance will be first-rate. Doesn’t matter the genre, the director, the screenwriter, the remaining cast; with McConaughey attached you are assured quality.
2012 was a particularly banner year for Matthew McConaughey thanks to Magic Mike, Killer Joe and The Paperboy. Nominated for, among others, a Film Independent Spirit Award as Best Male Lead for his performance in Killer Joe, he was also nominated for – and won – the Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male for his sizzling work as “Dallas” in Magic Mike. Chatting together after his Spirit Award win early in 2013, he teased me with what 2013 would herald. “Hopefully the run continues. Wait till you see what’s coming up this year! I’m really proud of the work.” Having now seen his 2013 endeavors, Mud, Dallas Buyers Club and The Wolf of Wall Street, McConaughey has every right to be proud as each performance is as good, if not better, than the next.
Catching up with him on the press circuit for Dallas Buyers Club, we talked about not only DBC but Mud, an indie gem that is, in a word, magnificent. I knew then that McConaughey is so strong in both films, and so diverse with the extremes of character, that come awards season, his name would again be bandied about for accolades and, with the Film Independent Spirit Awards, undoubtedly a double nominee again. As we now know, that is just what happened as McConaughey is not only nominated for and already awarded multiple critics’ awards and is an anticipated Oscar nominee, but he has again snagged himself Spirit Award accolades, nominated for Best Male Lead for Dallas Buyers Club and also as part of the ensemble named as winners/recipients of the Robert Altman Award for Mud.
According to McConaughey, “They were going to put Mud out last year but they held onto it and I’m glad they did. . . There are more people on the street so to speak that come up and have the most sincere love relationship with that movie. I think there’s something that takes people back to a really good spot with that. When I first saw it, I was like, “That’s the kind of movie that would have been a wide release in 1986.” Right? It kind of felt like the thing you went to the mall to see. I think it’s beautiful. I’m really honored by that movie. I love that film and that story, and I love that character.”
Shooting Mud only ten days after coming off Magic Mike, “I was like, ‘How do I go from that guy Dallas to playing Mud? because they’re very different.’” Tapping into similar threads of the characters helped the transition. “The one aspect that’s the same is they’re both dreamers because, if you remember, Dallas in Magic Mike, he lived on Neptune. And then Mud, I was always like, ‘Oh yeah, he’s up in the clouds all the time.’” But McConaughey gives full credit to the ease of transition with performance to Mud’s writer/director Jeff Nichols who “wrote a beautiful script. Fun for McConaughey was that while Mud was “character that would have allowed a lot of improvisation – a storyteller, a bullshitter. Was he telling the truth? Was he not? ”, they stuck close to what Nichols wrote in the script. “[I]t was quite simple. What you see on the screen is exactly what he wrote and exactly what we shot. It wasn’t one of those where we shot a bunch of stuff and we’re like, ‘Where’s that scene?’ I mean, it’s what we shot. There are maybe one or two scenes that aren’t in there, but he really put together a beautiful film.”
But one outstanding performance a year isn’t enough when it comes to Matthew McConaughey and as his next award-winning 2013 turn, he put balls to the wall with an electrifying performance as Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club. Already garnering multiple critics awards and a hot contender for Oscar gold for this performance, McConaughey has both a Golden Globes and Film Independent Spirit Award nomination under his belt for his turn as a heterosexual man diagnosed with advanced AIDS at the beginning of HIV research, in a time when AIDS was a dirty word and killing thousands by the day.
Describing Dallas Buyers Club as a film “to follow this one man’s life. . .what’s original is that you’ve got a heterosexual man. We haven’t seen that story from that guy’s point of view. And, he doesn’t start off as this crusader for the cause. He’s not waving the flag. If anything, he’s a selfish son of a bitch who’s doing what he can to survive. And also, it’s the fact that it came out at the inception of HIV. Nobody knew what the heck this thing was. The doctors didn’t know. It was all a brand new frontier. So, here’s this two-bit cowboy electrician with a 7th grade education who becomes an expert, basically a scientist, on how to extend your life in a healthy way [living] with HIV. And he was finding it out. It was the cusp. There was nothing to go off of. He just didn’t like what they were prescribing here, so he said, ‘I’m leaving the country. I’m going around the world. I’m going to figure out how to survive.’”
Written by Craig Borten, director Jean-Marc Vallee and McConaughey took the story and the character of Woodroof ever deeper. “Jean-Marc and I were real secure on what this story was and that allowed us still to come up with scenes. He added scenes. I added scenes. We added dialogue. We improvised. But we knew what movie we wanted to make. We were making the same movie, and we had to trust each other because there wasn’t time to go, ‘I’m not sure. Are we doing this right?’ You couldn’t be precious about it.” For McConaughey, that meant a lot of personal research. “I found out so much information about the guy when I went and met his family that I was always coming into scenes loaded with different things that Ron would do and how he spoke.”
Key to finding that voice were Woodroof’s personal diaries, research and audio interviews which his family gave to McConaughey. “It was like a Pandora’s box. I had all the interviews. I had the research that you see from the outside in. You see, I had him, not just his words, but him on tape. And that was very informative. . . When I got his diary, I got his monologue. And that’s where I learned if you get the monologue to the man, then you can have the dialogue so to speak. . . When [the Woodroof family] gave me his diary, I saw who the guy was on Monday morning with his pager on, charged, an electrician, organized, waiting for the call that never came. I knew who the guy was on Saturday night getting high with himself, doodling in his book, writing poems and really blasphemous jokes, and actually wondering, ‘What’s with this life? I kind of want to get out of here.’ You’d see what he’d wear. I was like, ‘Is this Halloween? He’s dressed up like a gangster.’ And they’d say, ‘No. That was just one Tuesday.’ And he loved these 30’s jazz bands and stuff.”
Challenging, however, was finding the right balance for Woodroof. “Ron was just such a feverish son of a bitch. He was just attacking at all times. He was like a rabid dog.” Promising that his performance “was true to Ron”, for McConaughey, it all came down to trust, trusting that if they kept the character true to the man, “this sort of bastard would want to make money, would want to be Scarface”, trust that “if we keep him doing that, his humanity will come out of that.”
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April 2014
