‘I’ve read all my bad reviews, and got them all out a few years ago. It’s a big file and I read them all.’
Matthew McConaughey, The Film Stage, 2013
The early 2000s saw a drastic turnaround in the career of Matthew McConaughey. Though he continued to be cast as a leading man, he was frequently starring in romantic comedies rather than dramas. He needed a formula that was suitable for his persona. McConaughey took a complete career change after U-571 by starring with pop star-actress Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner.
‘There was a lot of responsibility on [U-571] because it was based on real events and there are conflicts [sic] to overcome,’ McConaughey, then aged thirty-one, told Cinema.com. ‘[The Wedding Planner] was looser and not so structured. I got to be the lover, the knight coming over the hill. Being a romantic comedy there was more room for improvisation. My character’s a doctor but he’s not someone who’s defined by his occupation. It’s more about his affairs of the heart and how couples can stay friends after they break up.’
In The Wedding Planner McConaughey plays a local paediatrician named Steve Edison who falls in love with Mary Fore (played by Lopez) who is planning to marry Massimo Lenzetti (played by Justin Chambers), a childhood acquaintance she had been re-introduced to. Party Of Five’s Jennifer Love Hewitt and California Man star Brendan Fraser were originally cast to play the lead roles but were then replaced by real life couple Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr. Lopez and McConaughey were subsequently cast after their predecessors left the project due to scheduling conflicts.
‘There’s a real optimism to this film,’ McConaughey said to Cynthia Fuchs of Pop Matters on his first romantic comedy role. ‘It’s buoyant, a fairy tale that we’ve all heard one time or another, that you’re going to meet someone and it’s going to be true love and you’ll know it. It’s very innocent. And it’s a comedy set-up, so the thing to do is to play it at an even keel and as straightforward as possible. The dialogue and situations are already comedic, so I was trying to ground it as much as possible. But when I saw it, there were things that were coming out of my mouth where I was wondering, “Did you just say that?”’
Filming took place mostly in Golden Gate Park. McConaughey learned how to tango during the making of the film. It’s a complicated dance but he managed it in the end. He took some lessons, though he knew how to dance in general. He’s got rhythm but he was a little unschooled and didn’t know any steps.
The Wedding Planner, directed by Adam Shankman, was released in the US in January 2001 and was poorly received by critics, as it was in the UK when it was released in April. However, with a budget of just $35 million it went on to gross over $90 million at the worldwide box office. It was a lucky escape for McConaughey because although it wasn’t a flop, and he received some negative reviews, his co-star Lopez was nominated for a Razzie Award for ‘Worst Actress’. For McConaughey, though, it was easy money. It’s one reason why so many talented actors star in romantic comedies: the money is good and such films, if the chemistry between the co-stars is spot on and if the story is engaging and funny, are usually always box office hits.
‘You’re not supposed to get, you know, Hamletian about it,’ McConaughey explained to NPR’s Terry Gross of the Fresh Air show about the genre. ‘You’re not supposed to go deep. You go deep on those, you sink the ship. I had fun doing that and also trying to do those without emasculating the male, which can be done in those romantic comedies often.’
The rom-com has become a hugely successful genre much to the dread of most men who are forced to take their girlfriends or wives to the cinema.
Writing in Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum compared The Wedding Planner to My Best Friend’s Wedding, and said: ‘Where Julia Roberts turned the world on with her huggability, Lopez’s vibe is that of someone afraid to get mussed. And where Rupert Everett was divine as a sidekick, McConaughey is mortally ordinary as a main dish who spends most of his time smiling like a party guest.’
Michael Thomson of the BBC wrote on the website that: ‘Unfortunately, after the two leads become less wired in each other’s presence, and the sexual tension begins to droop, everyone seems to be reading an autocue.’
Jessica Winter said in Village Voice: ‘McConaughey is insufferably smug as always, while the bewilderingly miscast Diva appears bored and impatient.’
Desson Howe wrote in the Washington Post: ‘Matthew McConaughey’s her squeeze-in-the-making, buffed up like most male actors these days and doing his adorable Texan thang. But The Wedding Planner is definitely Jennifer’s parade.’
McConaughey’s critical stature was saved by a long forgotten film called Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, which eventually opened in March 2002 to reasonably positive reviews. Directed by Jill Sprecher, and written by her and her sister Karen, the film is about five different individuals who are in search of happiness when their paths intersect in different ways and impact their lives. McConaughey plays Troy, a district attorney, who is bereft with guilt following a hit and run accident in which he injures a cleaning woman named Beatrice (Clea DuVall). This spirals into the story of Beatrice who reassesses her life during her recuperation and begins to think about her colleague Dorrie (Tia Texada). An insurance claims manager named Gene (Alan Arkin) struggles to cope with his son’s drug addiction and fires a cheery staff member but realises he made an error and feels guilty. A college professor named Walker (John Turturro), who teaches physics, has a midlife crisis and becomes embroiled in a relationship with a colleague, while his wife Patricia (Amy Irving) finds incriminating evidence in Walker’s wallet after it was stolen and mailed to their home.
Scripted over the course of two months by the Sprecher sisters, the film took three years to make because of funding problems. The film did not receive a commercial release until early 2002, though it premiered at the 2001 Venice Film Festival and was shown at the Toronto Film Festival and various other international festivals throughout the rest of the year and into early 2002. It had a limited US release and opened in just nine cinemas earning almost $90,000 on its first weekend of release.
A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times: ‘It seems intuitively identifiable but strangely resistant to precise definition. Synonyms multiply by the dozen: chance, fate, coincidence, serendipity, the order of the universe – or, to give some human dimension to these chilly mathematical conceits: happiness, good fortune, kismet, grace, the meaning of life.’
Later that year McConaughey starred in Frailty, a psychological thriller marking the directorial debut of Apollo 13 actor Bill Paxton. He took on a major change in role reversals by appearing as a serial killer in the film. McConaughey plays a man named Fenton Meikis who enters an FBI office in Dallas one night and requests to speak to Agent Wesley Doyle, played by Powers Boothe. Meikis believes that his brother Adam (played by Levi Kreis) is the ‘God’s Hands’ serial killer that the FBI are tracking down. Paxton plays the widower father who is fanatically religious. As children, the brothers had been told by their father that they had been chosen by God to track down demons and destroy those whose names were given to him by an angel.
Screenwriter Brent Hanley spoke to DVD Talk’s Phillip Duncan about his experience working with McConaughey, a fellow Texan: ‘One of the things I learned most about actors and from actors, and McConaughey has been a huge mentor for the directing actors thing. The thing I’ve learned is how much can be said without saying anything. How a good screen actor can get across what you need them to get across without saying a fucking word. That to me is magical. I love that.’
The film opened in US cinemas in April 2002 and was a modest box office success with a budget of just $11 million. Reviews of the film were mostly positive. It reached the UK in September. Frailty has since become a cult classic amongst aficionados of dark thrillers and horror films. It is certainly an overlooked gem from this period of McConaughey’s career.
The Associated Press’ Christy Lemire wrote: ‘McConaughey gets top billing, but Paxton steals the show. And O’Leary more than holds his own again here. Too bad it’s in a movie that fails to live up to its potential.’
Robert Koehler wrote in Variety: ‘Pic is McConaughey’s most fully developed performance in several seasons; for Paxton, it adds to his growing gallery of nuanced, conflicted men from the heartland, while demonstrating that, in his feature helming debut, he already possesses the chops of a front-rank director… McConaughey reveals only as much about Meiks as he needs to, and never a moment too soon. It’s a poker-face performance supreme, both a portrait of a son’s tragedy and of a son absorbing his father’s legacy.’
The Guardian’s Xan Brooks said of the film: ‘Bill Paxton’s directing debut stands alone in a horror genre currently infested with pert teens and knowing plot tics. What we have here is addictive old-school hokum, an American Gothic comic-strip with a whiff of Wise Blood to its lurid design.’
Venturing deeper into mainstream Hollywood movies, McConaughey was cast as Denton Van Zan in the post-apocalyptic action fantasy film Reign of Fire about a breed of dragons that emerge from the earth setting fire to anyone and everything. It was his first action movie and his first stab at fantasy. Most of his past films had been dramas with real life characters so Reign of Fire was an altogether different movie.
‘Actually the idea came to me in a dream,’ McConaughey said to Phase9 TV. ‘Every other character I played in a movie had some sort of a biography to look at. But playing a dragon slayer in 2025 meant that there was no research I could do. It was all about imagination.’
Directed by Rob Bowman, and starring Christian Bale and Gerard Butler, the film is set in 2020 England though it was filmed in the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland with the cast and crew staying over in Dublin. It wasn’t filmed in England because at the time there was an outbreak of foot and mouth disease.
‘Reign of Fire was a whole other fun thing,’ McConaughey told The Film Experience’s Nathaniel R., ‘but that was all from the imaginary dragon slayer future. And if anyone disagreed with anything I was doing there, I could always just go, “You know any dragon slayers?” and no one answered yes so I was always safe with that one, right? [Laughter…] Here’s the deal: it’s really part of the fun. We get one day a year where we can dress up and be what we want to be. Halloween. It’s a costume. Well, the next thing is when you get to go perform and play and be someone else.’
There are lots of action scenes in the film and some fantastic computer generated effects, but also some lousy dialogue. It was rather odd to see McConaughey with a shaven head, beard and tattoos like a character out of the Mad Max films. He certainly got a few interesting reactions from family and friends as well as members of the public when he went outside. He just didn’t look like himself. He looked evil, like some sort of satanic cult member.
Having tattoos in the film tempted him to get them for real. ‘The tattoos were an idea that I came up with and worked on with a guy in a Dublin tattoo parlour,’ McConaughey admitted to Phase9 TV. ‘The tattoos are actually two dragons that wrap round my shoulder and come down to my navel. It was something very tribal that I was going for. They were painted on every morning and it took about two hours.’
When he shaved his hair he got a suntan on it to make him look darker. It took him eight months to grow the beard, and to get into shape he worked out at his ranch in Texas. He worked out with weights, ran four miles a day and boxed – which he continued to do during filming in Dublin. He has seventy cows at his ranch in Texas and he’d wrestle with them by throwing his shoulder into them trying to boost his strength. They didn’t bite too much. He even tried to get them into headlocks. It was fun and got him into the sort of shape he needed to be in for the film.
‘It’s easier at night when they’re kind of asleep, standing asleep,’ he elaborated to Total Film. ‘I wrestled some of the calves, some of the mid-sized cows, and then there are some big boys that I just booted around with. I got hit in the hip – pretty much had a black and blue hip for three weeks. It put me on my ass, for sure.’
He got some bumps and bruises on set too but he didn’t hurt himself too seriously. The scene where McConaughey head-butts Bale was real, though it was an accident and a heat of the moment move. It gave Bale a lump. Bale worked through and finished the scene. Both actors tried to make the fight look as real as possible. They got their fair share of bloodied knuckles and knees.
‘It dropped me like a sack of potatoes,’ Bale told Alec Cawthorne of the BBC, about the fight seen between his and McConaughey’s characters. ‘In the movie you see me crawl around the ground for a couple of seconds to try to find my bearings – that is real! Then I thought I had to get up and finish the scene or it was going to be no use. I could see that the film crew were staring to see if I was all right. When we finished I asked Matthew if he was OK. He said, “Yeah, you mad bastard – I headbutted you!”’
McConaughey had a blast making the film and was eager to jump right back into another action film. He’s not Arnold Schwarzenegger nor Sylvester Stallone and some could argue he looks a little bit out of sorts in an action film, but he gave it a good try.
McConaughey joked with About.com: Hollywood Movies’ Rebecca Murray and Fred Topel that dragons were easier to deal with than women: ‘Dragons you know. Dragons are simple. They’re in the sky, bang, bring them down to the ground, simple. Women, man, we’re never going to figure you all out. I think if we can enjoy trying to figure you all out, that’s the ticket. Forget trying to figure you all out – it’s impossible.’
McConaughey enjoyed his time in Dublin and devoured some of the local customs, including pints of Guinness. He had to be careful of his weight, though, because Guinness is heavy on the stomach. His favourite aspect of Ireland, however, was the people and the culture. He loved the local music and enjoyed sitting in pubs listening to bands and chatting with the locals. It’s a testosterone-fuelled film dominated by a male cast but what was life like together behind the camera and off set? ‘We went out in Dublin a few times,’ Bale told Alec Cawthorne of the BBC about his relationship with his co-stars, ‘and Matthew had parties at his place, but most of the time he was down at the boxing gym – sparring and just hitting somebody.’
It opened at number three at the box office in July 2002 behind the Tom Hanks led gangster drama Road to Perdition and the Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones blockbuster sequel Men in Black II. Reign of Fire grossed over $80 million and had a budget of $60 million. Reviews of the film were modest at best. It reached UK cinemas in August.
Alec Cawthorne wrote on the BBC website: ‘The grimness of the wiped-out world is offset by the campy posturing of a tattooed McConaughey, and while Bale is earnest as the guilt-stricken leader Quinn, he also gets the best Star Wars gag you’ll see in years, distracting the ragamuffin kids from the misery of their predicament.’
The Guardian’s Joe Queenan said: ‘Reign of Fire falls into the category of bad movies that are not nearly as bad as they could have been, and not nearly as bad as some of us would have liked them to be. This is a phenomenon often referred to as the Sandahl Bergman Conundrum or the Van Damme Anomaly. Shunning the camp qualities that usually permeate this genre of motion pictures, the film could have used a few more laughs.’
Elvis Mitchell wrote in The New York Times: ‘The movie might have been a minor classic if it had maximized its own possibilities. But until the rush wears off, the picture is as much fun as a great run at a slot machine: even when your luck runs out, you’re losing only pocket change.’
In 2003 McConaughey joined a cast of noted actors, including Tom Hanks and Stanley Tucci, to narrate an episode of the sixteen part series on the history of America, Freedom: A History of Us.
U-571, The Wedding Planner and Reign of Fire were reasonably successful box office films but they were certainly not enough to gain McConaughey critical praise after some of his highlights of the previous decade.
He’s an actor who enjoys playing character roles as much as lead roles as he told Crazed Fanboy’s Michael A. Smith: ‘I mean for me it’s not one or the other. In Reign of Fire, that was a real character role. My character in Larger Than Life was a character role. I love doing that kind of stuff. And I like playing a character where I say, “I know that dude.”’
*****
Simply put, too many of his early 2000s films were throw-away productions that gave him next to no credence or respect, with the exception of Frailty, which is often thought of as a minor classic and one of the most underrated horror films of the decade. Still, for an actor whose career was looking so prosperous in the 1990s he was appearing in one too many bad films. He needed a hit. The studios came calling with another rom-com. The money was good and the lead female co-star was bound to be sexy. He said yes.
‘We needed sexy, hot, charming, intelligent – really, how many guys are there out there like that?’ How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days producer Christine Peters told Variety’s Jenelle Riley. ‘He’s a true Southern gentleman.’
McConaughey knows how hard it is as an actor to take a role that is so well known in such a popular genre and make it work. If you fail as an actor to provide the laughs the whole film can sink. ‘I take the comedy real seriously,’ McConaughey admitted to The Guardian’s Andrew Pulver. ‘There’s a whole plan behind it. Even though those characters look like I’m just skating through, there’s a design behind it. They look easy-breezy, but if you go digging too deep into character, you sink the ship.’
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days opened in the US in February 2003 and the UK in April to mixed reviews from critics though it was a box office hit making over $100 million at the global box office. Directed by Donald Petrie it is based on a short cartoon novel by Michael Alexander and Jeannie Long, and stars McConaughey as Benjamin Barry, an advertising executive and ladies’ man who, to win an advertising campaign, places a bet that he can make a woman fall in love with him in ten days. Kate Hudson, daughter of Goldie Hawn, plays Andie Anderson, a writer who covers the ‘How To’ beat for Composure magazine and is commissioned to pen a piece on ‘How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days.’ The pair met at a bar after the bet is placed.
Like his character Ben, McConaughey has always been comfortable around women. He loves and appreciates women. McConaughey has certainly had his fair share of Hollywood beauties. He grew up in a loving family that was open about sex. He was taught about the birds and the bees from an early age when he started to date around thirteen or fourteen years old. He was told that if a woman was uncomfortable around him she wouldn’t say so, so he’d have to pick up on their mannerisms. He was taught never to push a woman into doing anything she didn’t want to do. His love and respect for women was one reason why he was drawn to the rom-com genre. McConaughey knows how to treat women and how to charm them. He knows when not to come on too strong and when to offer them space if they need it.
In the film, his character cooks a delicious meal. McConaughey is himself a pretty good cook as he confessed to People magazine: ‘I’ve got some culinary skills! I would consider myself a bit of a saucier. I make barbecue sauces, marinades, salad dressing. I like to eat healthy, and how do you make healthy food taste good? Because usually it’s boring. That’s why I got into the sauces.’
Dating for McConaughey can be an odd experience if the other person is not famous. It means they know things about him and he’s not aware how much knowledge his date has of him. What McConaughey likes about dating is the courtship between two strangers. It starts off with general things like name, family and job before the conversation gets deeper. If he meets someone who knows about him, and they ask him about his Airstream collection or his dog, he gets a bit freaked out because they know his biography.
‘I’m not much on the “direct” romantic,’ McConaughey admitted to About.com: Hollywood Movies’ Rebecca Murray and Fred Topel. ‘I’m not much on moves or lines or things like that, but I love to cook. It’s a great comfortable place that I find to get to know somebody, [to] have a date over to my house and cook. It’s a great place for conversation. I love conversation in the kitchen. I love having that one thing that I get to do, cooking while you’re there.’
McConaughey saw Kate Hudson in Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical film Almost Famous, and thought she was great in the role of rock groupie Penny Lane. After just five minutes of meeting her he knew they’d have great chemistry onscreen. She was in her early twenties at the time and very ambitious and comfortable with her sexuality. ‘Kate is really talented and really natural,’ McConaughey said to The Tech’s Allison C. Lewis. ‘She does every take different…she has great timing. She’s very relaxed and very playful. There’s chemistry between us on screen…it’s easy to be attracted to her.’
It’s a simple story – how hadn’t it been done before? ‘The funniest thing about this movie is not the jokes,’ McConaughey, then thirty-three years old, told The GW Hatchet’s Andy Metzger. ‘It’s got a great setup… The chemistry on screen is one of the undeniable things about this flick. It’s a chick flick but it appeals to dudes.’
A.O. Scott wrote of the film in The New York Times: ‘For his part, Mr. McConaughey steps into the role of comic foil with gentlemanly aplomb. You don’t believe this scrubbed and gleaming pair are really the love-struck and ambitious young Manhattan professionals they are pretending to be, but for the most part the pretending is reasonably enjoyable to watch.’
Writing in Empire, Anna Smith said: ‘Hudson and McConaughey are a likable pair in a light but efficient comedy that succeeds where The Wedding Planner failed.’
When McConaughey was promoting the film in Australia he spoke on a talk show about Eileen Crocker of the Crocker family with whom he stayed for five months as an exchange student in Australia in 1988. Sadly, she died later that year. It goes to show, though, just how family and friends are important to McConaughey in his life. He doesn’t forget those who help him.
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days was a successful enough film that Hollywood remembered Matthew McConaughey just as he was dangerously slipping off radar with a series of poor films, and it led to parts in other romantic comedies. He became the go-to-guy for romantic comedies and the cheques were good. The thing is, he was not known for his acting ability. It’s rare for a good-looking guy to be given credit for his talent. It would still be a few years before critics properly began to take note of his acting prowess. He needed heavyweight roles: a Rain Man (Tom Cruise) or a Philadelphia (Tom Hanks), or even a Pulp Fiction (John Travolta) to get the attention of the Oscar voters. Playing a handsome, charming man whom a woman may fall in love with didn’t exactly stretch his acting talents or gain him many positive notices from the pundits.
Such is the nature of the business that an actor could work on a film, move straight onto another set, and have the latter film released first, due to the fact that production and distribution times vary. Throughout this period McConaughey was working on a variety of projects, but few of them had serious credentials. It would be unfair to attack him for appearing on the cover of glossy magazines with his shirt off, or for his high-profile love life with female actors or good-looking industry types, because that is the lifestyle of a Hollywood star. McConaughey is someone different, though. He is part hippie, part Beat poet and part loner who plays the role of the lone travelling man rather well. He isn’t your usual celebrity – when he is fed up of the LA glitz and Hollywood lifestyle he goes back home to Texas where is treated as one of the locals and where he lives an ordinary life.
McConaughey spoke to IndieLondon about his obsession with linguistics and communicating ‘…whether it’s trying to get something across now or communicating with a director, or whether it’s going and travelling in different countries where they don’t speak a bit of the language and you end up using sign language. You end up finding out that you’re all speaking the same language but with different vocabularies. I love getting through that. I get more frustrated if I cannot communicate. That frustrates me more than anything. I’m obsessed with trying to understand what somebody is talking about and trying to get them to understand me.’
He continued to explore other projects by appearing as a fire fighter in the low-budget film Tiptoes (also known as Tiny Tiptoes) with Rene Russo, which went straight to DVD in August 2004 after it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January (though it actually premiered at the French Deauville Film Festival in September 2003).
Kate Beckinsale plays Carol, a painter and independent minded and confident woman who falls in love with Steven, played by McConaughey. She barely knows anything about him other than that he is her perfect man. She becomes pregnant and Steven finally tells her of his secret – he is the only averaged sized person in a family of dwarfs, which means that their unborn baby may be a dwarf. Steven’s twin brother Rolfe (played by Gary Oldman) is a dwarf, and as Steven and Carol grow apart as they struggle to deal with things, she becomes closer to Rolfe who teachers her about life as a dwarf. The director Matthew Bright was reportedly fired from the production, and the film was recut and promoted as a rom-com, possibly on the back of McConaughey’s success in The Wedding Planner and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. It’s one of his films that is best left unremembered.
Lisa Nesselson wrote in Variety: ‘Terrific make-up and visual effects help render the completely unrecognisable Oldman entirely convincing as a miniature man, whatever the camera angle. Evoking the matter-of-fact feel of brothers talking, he and McConaughey give their scenes together an emotional veracity lacking in too much of the pic.’
Writing on Reel Film, David Nusair said: ‘Likewise, McConaughey and Beckinsale make a convincing couple, though some of Steven’s decisions are a little hard to swallow (particularly as the film’s conclusion approaches). Director Matthew Bright seems to be going for a spontaneous, improvised sort of vibe, using takes that aren’t necessarily perfect – a choice that doesn’t entirely work. Presumably intended to lend the film an off-the-cuff feel, the decision instead contributes to an aura of sloppiness.’
Around this time, McConaughey let slip in interviews that he was trying to get a children’s movie off the ground, but nothing has since come into fruition. ‘…it’s a fairy tale with magic reality,’ he told Phase9 TV, ‘and it is about a little boy who is a fisherman. It’s about his dreams. There are a couple of really nice morals to the tale. I’m going to be writer/producer/director on that but right now I’ve got to get the thing written.’
The critics remained divided on their opinion of McConaughey: on the one hand he’s a box office success, handsome and charming; yet on the other he seemed more interested in appearing in lightweight comedies and cashing cheques than aiming for an Oscar. He was hounded by gossip magazines, dated leading Hollywood ladies and enjoyed a seemingly carefree lifestyle. In the 1990s he was just a humble kid from Texas who got lucky and became a Hollywood leading man; but then he became an A-list actor with a mansion in the Hollywood Hills with a tremendous view of Los Angeles. Years later he would own luxury properties in Malibu and Texas.
In 2004 he bought an Airstream trailer, his first of three, and when he felt LA was getting too much for him, he’d hit the road and stay in crummy motels, or even follow the route of his favourite bluesman Ali Farka Touré to Africa and backpack up the Niger River. He also visited a music festival north of Timbuktu. Sometimes he just had to check out, he had to get away from everywhere because he couldn’t stand the lifestyle anymore, but then he would return refreshed and with a clear mind.
‘Most of the time on a road trip, I’m just driving,’ he told the Independent’s Lesley O’Toole. ‘That’s my favourite place to think, or not think. I don’t go away to think about something, but I like to put myself in a place where answers sort of show up. My favourite place for that is behind the wheel, heading somewhere.’