by Neil Daniels
Levi wasn’t even two years old and already his dad took him to a John Mellencamp show. ‘We have a little bit more prep-time put into going places and doing things, getting him ready and everything,’ McConaughey said to People magazine’s Kelly Rondeau. ‘But it’s amazing.’
He learned a lot from his own parents but also learned from their mistakes. However, he is a bit softer on his own kids than his parents were on him and his elder brothers. He relishes being a family man; it suits his persona perfectly. Despite his success and fame he is a somewhat humble man and is close to his roots, but he also believes in giving something back to those who are not quite as fortunate as he has been, hence his charity commitments. With a steady family, a refreshed career and beautiful homes in Austin and Malibu, McConaughey was a happy man but he still kept that free spirit of his. ‘Am I a fun-loving guy, man? Who likes running around in the summer with his shirt off, man? Am I a guy who likes to hang out with his friends, and party and go to concerts and football games with his friends?’ he mused with Tom Chiarella of Esquire. ‘Well, yeah! Yes, I am. Always have been. Always hopefully will be. You know?’
He wasn’t done with big studio films, however – he wouldn’t be that stupid. The money is too good. He wanted to let go of the leash and try new roles and he found one in a sadistic contract-killing cop.
*****
The Exorcist and French Connection director William Friedkin cast McConaughey as Police Detective ‘Killer’ Joe Cooper in the critically acclaimed Killer Joe. The film – which co-starred Emile Hirsch as Chris Smith (son), Juno Temple as Dottie Smith (daughter), Gina Gershon as Sharla Smith (stepmother), Thomas Haden Church as Ansel Smith (father) and Marc Macaulay as Digger Soames, a gang boss – is violent and full of dark humour.
Killer Joe is set in West Dallas (though shot mostly in New Orleans which prompted criticism from Texans who felt it didn’t quite look like their state) and sees twenty-two-year-old drug dealer Chris Smith struggling to pay off debts to loan sharks so he decides to murder his mother Adele to collect the $50,000 insurance money. Chris hires Joe Cooper – whose side job is that of a contract killer – to help him but the plan almost fails when he struggles to pay Cooper’s fee. However, Cooper takes a shine to Dottie, who he takes as a retainer until the insurance money is cashed. The film follows the struggles between Chris and Cooper as it reaches a shocking finale.
‘He was being interviewed on one of those Larry King-type television shows,’ Friedkin explained to Movieline’s Jason Guerrasio, ‘and I saw him as himself, not as a guy in a romantic comedy. I thought this guy is really interesting and smart and very self-knowledgeable. He’s not this guy in the rom-coms. He’s from East Texas and he had the right accent and all of those things went well. I was originally going to go to some grizzled old warhorse to play Joe. But after watching this interview I thought, “This would be interesting: A good-looking guy who could charm the mustard off a hot dog.” I thought, “This is the way I want to go.”’
When McConaughey first read the script he didn’t get it; he wasn’t sympathetic to the character at all. He made him feel sick; it almost repulsed him. He spoke to one of his colleagues about the script and they helped talk him around, and then he chatted to Friedkin who helped him look at the script in a different light. It was the film Frailty and McConaughey’s knowledge of Texas, which, added to the DNA of Killer Joe, convinced Friedkin that Matthew was right for the part. McConaughey reread the script and then it clicked. He found the character of Joe Cooper to be hilarious, albeit in a dark way. He thought of it as an odd love story like King Kong, the 1976 version with Jessica Lange, which had made an impression on him as a child. The movie made him question what true love really is.
Friedkin had directed the likes of Gene Hackman in The French Connection, Willem Dafoe in To Live and Die in LA and David Caruso in Jade but he hadn’t worked with such a good-looking and popular mainstream Hollywood actor as McConaughey. ‘I know how little they value the acting of a great-looking guy in Hollywood,’ Friedkin said to Dennis Lim of The New York Times. ‘They don’t want you to act, they just want you to show up and convincingly make love to the leading lady. A guy like Matthew has to take charge of his own career, because the studios will cast him in the same part every time out.’
Friedkin admired McConaughey for striving to progress his career. Hollywood studios didn’t want him to act; they just wanted him to take his shirt off and show himself off in front of the camera. McConaughey was looking for roles that challenged him, even though the Hollywood studios didn’t want him to as they didn’t want to lose money, so going down the indie film route was his only option. ‘McConaughey was making $10 million a picture just playing a kind of good-looking dude who gets the girl,’ Friedkin said to Den of Geek’s James Peaty. ‘A lot of actors are trying… I mean, DiCaprio is trying to stretch out and time will tell if he can. McConaughey obviously could and clearly has the chops. He could still go on and make those romantic-comedies looking the way he does, but that isn’t really who he is or what he wants to do.’
Friedkin has, throughout his career, been attacked by critics for being a sensationalist and Killer Joe has some incredibly dark scenes. There is a lot of nudity and violence, with hints at incest and paedophilia. The scene where Killer Joe forces Sharla Smith to pretend to perform oral sex on him with a piece of fried chicken was not easy to shoot for either the cast or the crew. McConaughey didn’t warm up for the scene; he just went in there and filmed it. It’s the film’s most sadistically memorable scene.
‘When you get the schedule, that’s the scene you look forward to – like, “What day is that?”’ he said to the Scotsman about the scene. ‘But I felt such ownership of the character by that point that I didn’t think much about it, aside from saying, “I’ve got to do it.” No easing into it either. This is one take, baby.’
McConaughey’s character can be compared to Casey Affleck’s Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford in the controversial Michael Winterbottom film from 2010, The Killer Inside Me based on the cult Jim Thompson noir novel. They’re both sadistic men, tormented and corrupt but also a product of their upbringing and the morally questionable society around them. It was the sort of tough as nails role that would go to the likes of Josh Brolin or Tom Berenger.
He actually found shooting Killer Joe to be easier than some of the rom-coms he’d done. A rom-com is pitched at ‘buoyant’ rather than ‘deep’, whereas Killer Joe was evidently cold and distant with no trace of morale or humanity.
For the most part McConaughey prefers not to reshoot scenes over and over again. With The Lincoln Lawyer he averaged around three of four takes but Friedkin prefers a maximum of two and that’s how McConaughey likes to work. He prefers it when there isn’t a warm up to the scene; he just goes on set and gets it over with. Then again, there are times when he doesn’t mind doing more takes (depending on the film) because he has a huge amount of energy and likes to try something a little different every now and again.
McConaughey spoke to Cinema Blend’s Eric Eisenberg about his method to acting: ‘I can’t go back to my trailer to wait, to then re-enter the next scene. Let’s show up on set that day and everyone be prepared, and let’s crank and shoot film all day. Let’s rehearse it on film.’
The film struggled with censors who labelled it too violent for mass consumption and consequently it was cut down to 98 minutes from its original length of 102 minutes and given an NC-17 rating in the US and an 18 certificate by the BBFC in the UK. Generally, such a rating is considered to kill a film at the box office. The original cut was released on DVD in late 2012.
Killer Joe brought McConaughey great critical acclaim after it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2011 and was shown at various international film festivals throughout the year but struggled to get an international release. LD Entertainment finally picked up the distribution rights to the film at the 2011 Toronto International Film festival. It made its UK premiere at the Opening Gala of the Ed
inburgh International Film Festival on 20 June 2012 and was introduced by Friedkin and actress Gina Gershon.
It was eventually given an official, albeit small, theatrical release in the UK on 29 June and finally opened in the States on 27 July 2012 in just three cinemas. It had only been released to seventy-five cinemas across the US and closed on 14 October 14. The film was not, by any stretch, a box office hit. It grossed just $1,987,762 at the US box office and only $1,677,307 worldwide, reaping almost $4 million in total. Its budget, though, was $10 million. On the plus side, McConaughey received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for ‘Best Male Lead’ and also received a nomination from the San Diego Film Critics Society for ‘Best Supporting Actor’. He won ‘Actor Of The Year’ from the Central Ohio Film Critics Association, a ‘Special Honorary Award’ from the Austin Film Critics Association and ‘Best Actor’ at the Saturn Awards.
Some critics felt it pushed the Southern gothic into unnecessary boundaries of indecency while some praised its boldness. It certainly helped McConaughey ditch his Hollywood rom-com leading man persona even further. He was working overtime on a series of unconventional yet utterly mesmerising roles. Seen with a black cowboy hat and aviator shades, McConaughey gives the performance of his career – daring, witty and sadistically dark. His character is a monster. Friedkin had turned McConaughey’s persona into something uncomfortably macabre, the way Hitchcock had done with James Stewart in Vertigo and Rear Window, or how Anthony Minghella used Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley.
The Guardian’s Caroline Shoard wrote: ‘Performances are across-the-board terrific, with Gershon and Haden Church blurring the lines of caricature, while McConaughey freezes blood as a man whose dogged adherence to a bent code of conduct fills the vacuum in a not entirely negative way.’
Ian Nathan wrote in Empire: ‘McConaughey gives the film its Mephistophelean pull: his line-delivery lacquered with honeyed menace, he summons a dread-like gravity – a vilely hilarious stride along his quest to prove he is more than the jutting prow of Kate Hudson rom-coms.’
David Sexton in the Evening Standard wrote: ‘It’s a real actor’s piece and the central roles have been brilliantly cast here. Matthew McConaughey, previously always the likeable rom-com hero who gets his shirt off, is a stone cold brute as Joe, intelligent and scary, stylishly dressed and speaking very slowly and formally, then suddenly exploding into violence.’
McConaughey was continuing to look for roles that would challenge him as an actor – and he found one about male strippers. So, is it irony that McConaughey was cast in a film about male strippers given his reputation for appearing bare-chested? ‘I’m not a daily reader of page, whatever, Six,’ he said to The New York Times’ Dennis Lim. ‘Hell, I didn’t know until two years after it started that there was a phenomenon about me being shirtless.’
He was cast alongside Channing Tatum in the 2012 film Magic Mike, based on Tatum’s early life. The film was directed by Sex, Lies and Videotape and Ocean’s 11 director Steven Soderbergh. McConaughey had been confirmed as a member of the cast on 16 August 2011 and was the first actor to be cast after Tatum. McConaughey spoke to director Steve Soderbergh over the phone pitching to him the character of Dallas. After ten minutes of banter and laughs, McConaughey accepted the part. It was only the second time he’d accepted a film role over the phone; the first time being for a Linklater film, either The Newton Boys or Bernie.
‘Matthew understood the part so well,’ Soderbergh informed Mary Kaye Schilling of Vulture, ‘and had such good ideas that I had no desire to box him in. So I just said yes to everything, which turned out to be the right way to go. I think the only note I gave him, when I first pitched him the part on the phone, was that his character believed in UFOs.’
‘When I first talked to Steven,’ McConaughey explained at a press junket for the film, ‘he called to offer the role of Dallas to me. He had pitched the story and told me who this guy was and I was laughing really hard on the phone and said yes. I said, “Can you give me one line just so I can hang up the phone and walk away here and imagination can go somewhere?” He said, “Well, this guy Dallas is pretty connected with UFOs, man.” So, that was a great launch pad. It was a pretty roofless bit of direction on the phone in the beginning and so I knew that I was going to be able to fly. That was really fun to play someone so committed in many ways.’
The cast visited male strip clubs to get a feel for the role and visited strippers backstage; and McConaughey took a trip to an LA strip club to get used to regular waxing. Filming started in September and finished at the end of October 2011.
For research McConaughey visited a male revue in New Orleans with Tatum. They hit out in the back so they wouldn’t get recognised. ‘The one thing I got from that: this is not these guys’ real jobs,’ he said to The Daily Beast’s Ramin Setoodeh. ‘One guy I met that night was back from Afghanistan. Another guy was a lawyer and had three kids. They all looked like accountants when they were in street clothes. The other thing I learned is the production value is horrible. I said to Steven, “Can I run this production?” I took off on that. I became P.T. Barnum. I was channelling Jim Morrison and Malcolm McDowell from A Clockwork Orange.’
Magic Mike tells the story of a nineteen-year-old man played by Alex Pettyfer who enters the world of male stripping helped by veteran stripper Michael ‘Magic Mike’ Lane (played by Channing Tatum). The film is loosely based on Tatum, who was once an eighteen-year-old stripper in Tampa, Florida.
McConaughey plays Dallas, a former stripper and businessman who owns the strip club Xquisite and is Mike’s boss. McConaughey had no stripping scenes in the original script but requested one, which became the closing dance number where he shouts ‘Ladies of Tampa’ and then strips. The song was written in three hours by music supervisor Frankie Pine, McConaughey and his guitar coach Martin Blasick. The rest of the cast includes Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello and Cody Horn.
McConaughey had to work out for the role because he’d just finished filming The Paperboy, which hadn’t been released at that point. He hadn’t been to the gym in four months and had just eleven days to get ready. He had to be in great shape to make his character plausible because the one thing male strippers are in is fantastic physical condition. The better shape they’re in, the more money they’ll make from female punters. His character in the film is a capitalist and wouldn’t have his strippers in poor shape; he’d knock them back. So he had to be in great shape himself. He had to learn some moves, too – stripers entertain for two hours and the music has to be on time, lighting, intros, exits and so on is all part of the show and it has to be perfectly arranged.
McConaughey was nervous shooting the strip scene (with ‘Doctor Love’ by KISS playing through the club’s sound system) but reckoned that if he didn’t film it, he’d regret it for the rest of his life. He likes the basic premise of guy in a very seedy world who is looking to get out of it and move on to the next stage of his life. His wife was very supportive of him and even turned up on set to his surprise. She was there on set the day he performed his strip and thought her husband was terrific. She knew how much work he’d put into it and how dedicated he was to the role. ‘Before going out on the stage to dance,’ McConaughey said at a press junket for the film, ‘even if you’re not taking your clothes off, for everyone live is kind of nerve racking, but then knowing you have to strip down – very nerve racking. Then after doing it once, God, I wanted to get up there and do it again. That was a lot of fun.’
Dressed in a thong, one side was ripped off by one of the extras in the audience and ‘I remember that moment, it’s really clear to me,’ he told Ramin Setoodeh of The Daily Beast. ‘I did feel the chill of the air hit me in some spots that it hadn’t hit me before. As soon as I felt that, I stayed in rhythm, my hand went down, made sure I held the straps up, I cupped it between my legs and stood up and did a body roll out. I stayed on the beat and stayed right on tune, and then just kind of walked out of there, one hand up, one hand down,
holding the thong on.’
When McConaughey first put on the thong he walked around trying to have normal conversations about football or what he ate the night before so he could get used to the thing, to feel normal and comfortable in it.
‘It’s a huge leap of faith to trust a thong,’ McConaughey said at a press junket at the Four Seasons Hotel in LA as quoted in The Hollywood Reporter. ‘It’s your only protection up on stage. When I first tried it on, my body contorted. And I tried to get myself into every position to see what angles I was covered.’
McConaughey enjoys the creative process, especially on his recent films. There’s no guarantee that the film will be a commercial or critical hit, or that it’ll not go straight to rental, but McConaughey takes knowledge from each role and learns from the process, trying to better himself.
Magic Mike was a strong part for him. ‘Something I’ve learned in the last two years that’s really been quite helpful,’ he confessed to The Film Experience’s Nathaniel R. in 2014, ‘and I’m enjoying it is I’m trying to seek out experiences, trying to seek out something I can do with the process. Not the result – we’ll see. Man, if I’m thinking about that result I’m going to miss something right in front of me. So let’s just make sure I do my best to look around me and go, “I think the director can be excellent, the people, we can make an excellent movie. The script is good enough and with all these pieces in place? Alright, check you later. Diving in!”’
McConaughey takes his characters very seriously, as if they are real people. He finds enjoyment in creating life outside of the script. He’s interested in knowing what they would and wouldn’t do off screen. ‘And I was sharing all this stuff with Steven [Soderbergh],’ McConaughey explained to Vulture’s Jennifer Vineyard, ‘about Dallas breathing fire and whatnot, in these eight-, nine-, ten-page e-mails, and Steven did a cool, smart thing by only saying a little back: “Yep.” “Sure.” He put it on the actor’s shoulders to go, “I own it.” And if you can get to that spot, then you’re on it. That’s when you’re like, “Yeah!” It’s not always like that.’