His father, who died when McConaughey was 21, was a highly successful entrepreneur in the oil business, selling lengths of pipe, among other things.
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When he first read the script, McConaughey became convinced he had a unique insight into Wells’ character. You can say, ‘Oh he’s such a scallywag.’ But oh, man. “I know a lot of people – and I don’t care for what they do, I wouldn’t trust ’em with my kids, or round my family – but boy, I respect who they are,” says McConaughey. (He most famously shed almost the same amount of weight for Dallas Buyers Club, and in 2012 piled on the muscle to play a stripper in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike.) He was also required, for most of the movie, to play lightly drunk, and his depiction of Wells as a good-hearted but ultimately disastrous loose cannon – a man who burns through a lot of other people’s money – is hard to resist. After a few small, dark films it culminated in his 2014 Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club.įor the making of Gold, McConaughey gained 45lb, wore a bald cap to make his hair appear thinner and put in a set of unflattering dentures, a radical transformation typical of his third act. Then McConaughey entered a third phase, widely characterised as his big gamble to be taken seriously, but which he says was a “life vest” at a time when acting had become deeply uninteresting. In the early to mid-2000s, he made a slew of romantic comedies in which he bounced around on the beach or trailed young ladies through the streets of Manhattan, with an easy charm that both enhanced and circumscribed his appeal.
AND THEN THERE WAS YOU 2014 MOVIE
For a long time, his public image was closely identified with his first movie role, as Wooderson, a good-natured stoner in Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused. Now 47, McConaughey stretches out in his chair, limbs splayed, a lazy smile on his face that he keeps just this side of a smirk. It is a long way from McConaughey the hustler’s child to the sleek actor before me in a New York hotel room.
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In the actor’s mind, that shambolic entrepreneurism is typical of what the movie calls “the hustlers, the scrappers, the make-it-happen muthafuckers”. That character, Kenny Wells, is himself based on a real person, a businessman who in the early 1990s struck gold in Indonesia and was briefly worth $4bn, before the deal catastrophically derailed.
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I n Matthew McConaughey’s new movie, Gold, he plays a man whose characterisation he loosely based on his father.