CHAPTER SIX

JUST KEEP LIVIN’

‘I’m starting this brand [j.k. livin] because it accents a positive. It spreads a good word, puts a smile on my face.’

Matthew McConaughey, Texas Monthly, 2008

Based on the novel of the same name by Clive Cussler, McConaughey plays Dirk Pitt in Sahara, an Indiana Jones-style adventurer who goes on an adventure to the deserts of West Africa to seek the lost Civil War battleship known as the ‘Ship of Death’. En route he helps a World Health Organisation doctor Eva Rojas (played by Penélope Cruz) who is being hunted down by a ruthless dictator.

‘As executive producer, it proved challenging,’ McConaughey admitted to Hollywood.com. ‘It was a 700-page book that you had to break down into a 120-page script. You’re going to go from A to C and sometimes skip out B. You’re going to pick out the scenes that capture the essence of what the author was trying to get across. Even before I knew of Clive Cussler’s books and his character, Dirk Pitt, I was looking for a role like this.’

The film started for McConaughey several years before when he went to Clive Cussler, lobbying to get the film made. He visited him at his home in Telluride, Colorado and two more times subsequently in Phoenix, Arizona. He finally got the author’s approval when the script and financing came together and the film was green-lit. McConaughey’s name wasn’t listed as an executive producer just for the heck of it; he had put in a lot of time and legwork into getting the film made. He was involved in all aspects of production. He met with director Breck Eisner, saw his work and had a couple of sit-downs with him to see if he was the right man for the director’s chair. They agreed on what angles they should take with the film in terms of how much comedy was necessary and whether they should pitch it as an action adventure or action comedy. The original idea was that Sahara was going to be a franchise film. They also had Cussler’s approval for casting and they both agreed on Steve Zahn together. McConaughey wrote Zahn a letter telling him about the film before the script was sent to him. Zahn enjoyed what he read and jumped on-board. Suffice it to say McConaughey was hands-on.

Dirk Pitt’s main aim in life is to search for treasures and go on adventures. He’s from a privileged background – his dad was a Senator – but he has his own agenda in life. He’s got the knowledge, stamina and energy, as well as the training and history to hunt for lost treasures. Pitt always has a plan but the fun part for the audience (or readers of the books) is that the plan doesn’t always go smoothly and so he becomes an action hero. He manages to get himself out of trouble by winging it, even though he is trained and skilled. McConaughey loved the character and thought he was a great hero for the modern day. ‘Sometimes he’s a scientist, sometimes he’s an inventor, sometimes he’s an adventurer,’ McConaughey told Cinema.com of Dirk Pitt. ‘He’s a guy who’s got plans, but those plans are always changing; he’s ready for the unexpected. He’s a great adapter. He’s been a Navy SEAL, but he’s also part pirate. He’s definitely a lover before a fighter, but if he’s got to fight, he handles his own.’

The film provided McConaughey with a chance to travel. Africa was one of the most stunning places he’d ever been to and he loved filming there. He’d already been to Mali – where the story takes place – twice on his own so it was a fantastic opportunity to go there for a third time. He adored the country, culture and people. He was taken aback by the history of the people and how they respect their ancestors. They have a simple way of life, which McConaughey found interesting. They don’t make plans for the future but live day by day and it’s something McConaughey appreciated.

The cast and crew had to respect the local tribes, their culture and way of life. This prompted McConaughey to do some research prior to filming. Their languages and how they lived intrigued him. He learned what some of the hand gestures meant and what the protocols of the villages are. He saw how they don’t waste anything and use chicken, rice and spices. As a result of the villagers’ hospitality, he took over some western goods such as aspirin and fungus cream to repay them.

Sahara is very much a buddy movie between McConaughey and Zahn. Their chemistry is not as obvious and their relationship is not as entertaining as that of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies, but it works for this sort of film. On the one hand you’ve got McConaughey’s smooth southern charm, and on the other you’ve got Zahn’s screwball slapstick comedy which bounce off each other well in a film with so many gun-toting action scenes and foreign locations.

McConaughey and Zahn had to undergo great physical endurance for their respective roles. Much of McConaughey’s training, for example, included mountain climbing and hiking on location in Africa, and aside from that, during pre-production in LA, he did a lot of boxing, rock climbing and weightlifting. He saw it not only as a physical but also spiritual transformation. Zahn learned how to throw some flashy moves with hand weapons, slinging guns as though he was in a western.

Production was hit by a couple of storms so they had to shut down filming temporarily. It was something the locals warned them about. They decided to shoot through the sand storms and the locust storms just to see what happened. It’s a struggle against Mother Nature in the Sahara Desert and they felt they were at her mercy, but they soldiered on and completed filming. There was also the scorching heat and insect infestations to contend with.

McConaughey spoke to Hollywood.com about Penélope Cruz’s experience riding a camel: ‘She got to be very good on her camel but saved it all for the take. She was lagging behind Steve [Zahn] and I but when we starting rolling film, she flew by us. This kind of movie is not for everybody, man or woman, especially going in as a woman in a big action adventure with the guys. But she dove in, she wanted to do that and she did.’

Released in April 2005, the film’s box office receipts barely accounted for half of its overall expenses. It grossed $160 million in production costs and a further $81.1 million in distribution expenses. The film grossed $122 million in box office sales but it lost around $105 million overall. It was expected to make $202.09 million with an overall expense of $281.2. Such was the perceived box office failure of the film, that proposed ideas for an Indiana Jones or James Bond style franchise based on further Dirk Pitt adventures were scrapped.

‘I thought the movie was close to what we were shooting for,’ he reflected to Chud’s Devin Faraci in 2006. ‘I was overall happy with the film. I thought it was a lot of fun, I thought it knew what it was, I thought the film never tried to be what it wasn’t. Our plan, our hopes, was to make a franchise of them – that’s why I got involved, because I wanted to come back as Dirk Pitt. There are a bunch of books. We didn’t quite make the money that we had hoped to greenlight another film. It’s doing great on DVD, and that might give us a chance to do another one. It did wonderfully international and it’s doing great on DVD. You know how much money you can make on DVD these days.’

Such a franchise would have potentially been great for McConaughey’s career, especially after a series of so-so films. McConaughey’s career was hardly going smoothly, not for a man of his talents. The roles were not challenging enough. It seems as though the critical acclaim that had greeted him in the 1990s was a thing of the past, and any notion of becoming the next Tom Cruise – a talented good-looking actor with massive global box office appeal – was not going to happen; certainly not with films such as Sahara and risible nonsense like The Wedding Planner – not forgetting such howlers as Tiptoes. He desperately needed to reinvent himself if he was going to be taken seriously or if he was going to remain a legitimate bankable A-list Hollywood movie star. He could have become a household name, but with too many failures and distinctly average films, at least as far as box office receipts were concerned, his commercial appeal was slipping. However, for every perceived failure like Sahara, there was a little gem of a film like Frailty, and it was those small productions that kept him on the favourable side of the critics when his commercial films were often so badly received, especially as the rom-com genre had become very stale and predictable. McConaughey was simply a better actor than many of the films he was starring in.

Sahara was used by the Los Angeles Times in a special report on 15 April 2007 as an example of how Hollywood films can cost so much yet recoup barely half of their expenses. The film was involved in a multi-million dollar legal wrangle between author Clive Cussler and producer Philip Anschutz and some of the documents pertaining to the film’s finances were made public.

McConaughey promoted its upcoming release by repeating trips he took in the late 1990s, such as sailing down the Amazon River or trekking to Mali. He drove his own Airstream trailer, which had a huge Sahara film poster on each side, across America, where he stopped at five military bases and several colleges.

McConaughey came up with the idea of using his Airstream for promoting the film when his production company partner said they should maximise the film campaign by going out on the open road. McConaughey loved the idea. ‘We talked about it for a few minutes and then that night I woke up at three in the morning with a vision of the Airstream being wrapped in a billboard,’ he admitted to Crazed Fanboy’s Michael A. Smith. ‘So the next morning I called Paramount and said, “Hey, I’ve got an idea.” I told them about the Airstream and they laughed. So I called them back the next day and reminded them that I was serious. So we got that done and they started working with me on that.’

The first stop on the journey was Daytona 500 where he marshalled the race. He had just six weeks so Canada and Mexico were out of the question. From Daytona he ventured to Orlando, and then on to Macon, Georgia, Atlanta, New Jersey, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, and finally to LA for the film’s premiere, where he got out of the camper and walked the red carpet in front of the glare of the world’s paparazzi and entertainment journalists. He totalled 6,000 miles! It was not the first time he’d done a road trip in his Airstream. The year before he’d driven from LA to Florida and back through Kansas City and Colorado in a forty-day venture. It was just him and his dog, alone and on a solo road jaunt.

Matthew attended premieres of the film, signed autographs for fans and did interviews at each stop: 3,000 hats and more than 4,000 T-shirts were handed out to fans at truck stops and cafes. It was a huge, heavily hyped publicity blitz.

‘It’s a little more organic, you know?’ he said to Empire about the whole experience. ‘I’m seeing new places, new faces, new parts of the land. It’s been fun. I’ve just got out of a theatre and the film went down real well. We talked to a lot of college students, to a lot of people in the services who’ve just got back from Iraq. A lot of the guys missing their arms, their legs, on crutches. It was a pretty eye-opening experience.’

There was an E! channel special on the film release, too, and while all this was going on, McConaughey kept a blog of his trip on MTV’s entertainment website. Viacom owns both Paramount, the film’s distributor, and MTV.

Despite the perceived failure of the film, McConaughey was nominated for two Teen Choice Awards: ‘Choice Movie Actor: Action/Adventure/Thriller’ and ‘Choice Movie Liplock’ (with his co-star Cruz). McConaughey also made the celebrity headlines that year. ‘I like the “Alive” part,’ said McConaughey, then thirty-six, to People on being crowned their ‘20th Sexiest Man Alive’. ‘Now I’ve made it. Wait until you see the roles I could take after this. You’re going to see my gut hanging over, plus 22 (lbs.). It’ll be a whole new kind of sexy!’

Kay, his mother, joked that it was about damn time when he’d called to tell her the news. ‘Not much has changed, man,’ he also said to J.P. Mangalindan of The Cinema Source in reaction to the poll. ‘It’s been fun, to be fair; it’s funny too. When they called me, I laughed, and when I called my mom, she said, “It’s about damned time!”’

Sahara doesn’t mess about – as soon as the characters are introduced it gets straight into the action, which makes it appealing to young people. McConaughey enjoyed playing Dirk Pitt and spoke about returning to the character, but it’s unlikely that will ever happen. ‘The film knows what it is,’ he explained to Hollywood.com, ‘has a real definite personality to it. Sets up the rules in the first act with a wink. And then never really breaks them, so in that way it remains a classy action adventure. Doesn’t take itself too seriously, got some killer action sequences.’

Sahara opened in the US and UK in April 2005. It received mixed reviews from film journalists and, suffice it to say, fans of the novels were not too pleased with the end result. The film provided another opportunity for McConaughey to show off his body, for which he was mocked. But in his eyes, if you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times: ‘Sahara may be the ultimate test of Matthew McConaughey’s still-unrealised potential to enter Hollywood’s magic circle. If this movie can’t propel the 35-year-old Texan actor into Harrison Ford’s $20 million trekking boots, nothing can, and the longstanding heir apparent will never be king. His character, Dirk Pitt, an unflappably game treasure hunter obsessed with finding a Confederate ironclad ship that disappeared at the end of the Civil War and may have landed in Africa, epitomises Rhett Butler Lite. Twinkling and sinewy, his rakish insolence accented by a moustache, Mr. McConaughey’s Dirk is the Flower of Southern Manhood, Texan-style, a fearless all-American pirate with a keen sense of humour and a social conscience.’

Empire’s Dan Jolin wrote: ‘At the eye of this silly, swirling desert storm is the winning buddy act of McConaughey’s Dirk and Steve Zahn’s Al Giordino. Buff, browned, with a blinding ivory grin and twinkly baby-greens, McConaughey fills out Pitt’s grubby khakis perfectly. Here’s a guy you believe can have a solution to every life-threatening problem, who matches brawn with brains and who rarely breaks a sweat, even when the bullets are flying.’

Total Film said: ‘If the new plan is to dim down the star dazzle and focus on the action, then it’s worked. Matthew McConaughey has coasted for too long now, and, perma-tanned and pearly toothed, he wholeheartedly dives in to Dirk Pitt, swiping Indy’s raffish swagger but also factoring in bits of Bond, Brucie and even, briefly, The Life Aquatic’s Steve Zissou. Whether the character is universal enough to sustain a series remains to be seen, but McConaughey’s work is certainly done.’

The documentary, Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D, opened in US cinemas in September 2005. McConaughey was one of the voiceover narrators along with an ensemble cast featuring Matt Damon, Paul Newman, John Travolta, Morgan Freeman and Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston. Tom Hanks is the main narrator and co-wrote and produced the documentary, which includes NASA footage and re-enactments, plus CGI about the first people on the Moon as part of the Apollo program. Mark Cowen directed it, and though it is only forty minutes in length, it received positive reviews. Maggie McKee wrote in the New Scientist: ‘Though some such scenes are overly sentimental, the movie leaves viewers with the sense that they have experienced the Moon first-hand – and raises questions about how difficult a return to the desolate landscape may be.’

McConaughey was then cast as a gambling protégé to Al Pacino’s gambling mogul in Two for the Money, which opened in the US in October 2005 and in the UK in March 2006. Directed by D.J. Caruso and set in the world of sports gambling, McConaughey plays Brandon Lang, a former college football star who takes up handicapping football games after his career ends due to an injury. He is so successful at it that he comes to the attention of Walter Abrams, played by Pacino, who runs one of the biggest sports consulting operations in America, and the pair begin to make huge sums of cash.

McConaughey was asked by MovieWeb’s Evan ‘Mushy’ Jacobs if he saw parallels between his character’s rise and fall and that of the Hollywood lifestyle. ‘What I saw was a guy who was a winner and all of the sudden starts losing,’ he responded. ‘That’s where the drama was for this character for me. What do you do if you’re a winner? Not that you think you can win, you are a winner. And you all of the sudden are not winning. What do you do? You go back to the world where it all made sense when you were winning. And all of the sudden you find out that that world wasn’t real. That was all an illusion. Uh-oh, you go to people that have kind of become your family, and you find out that that rug has kind of been pulled out from under you, too. To top that off, you don’t only need to win to get somebody’s money back, you need to win to survive and help your family survive, because some of the people that lost the money took it real personal, and went to make threats on your family.’

McConaughey thought it was a terrific story about a winner who starts losing. If you’re a winner or have a consistent streak of winning things and then start losing, how do you change that? How do you start winning again and return to good fortunes? McConaughey saw great potential in his role when he first read the script. His character, Lang, finds out that the gambling world is an illusion and that everything is not as it seems. When Lang discovers this, and finds out that his relationships are also not what they seem, he decides he wants out as he realises there’s more than just money to lose. McConaughey saw it as a survival story. McConaughey was attracted to the dramatic side of the tale in that his character loved football and excelled at it, but lost the ability to play again, which happens every day in some form another, so his character looked to other things that he was good at, one of which was picking the winner. He gets offered money by people to gamble, but the world he enters is not what it seems and it tries to corrupt him. It’s not the gambling that changes him, nor his winnings, but rather the people who enter his life. McConaughey was drawn into the realism of the film.

McConaughey appreciated that his character was the one person in the story who was not addicted to anything and that’s where much of the film’s drama comes from. He’s sucked into a world filled with addicts; people who cannot control their gambling. It’s a business where people get addicted, rich or poor, and Lang is drawn to it. McConaughey didn’t think gambling corrupted Lang; he’s a winner and was good at what he was doing until he had a losing streak. McConaughey wanted to root for his character; he wanted Lang to keep on winning. Lang is not cheating, lying or stealing and McConaughey admired that. Sure, Lang has slicked back hair and talks a little faster than most people but Lang is a winner and McConaughey saw Lang as someone more than black and white. Winners, and indeed losers, go through role reversals when their fortunes change but it doesn’t make them corrupt.

With varying credits to his name, McConaughey hadn’t been in a drama like this for a while, so when it came across his desk he jumped at the chance to switch from light-hearted comedies to a meaty drama. The other side of Two for the Money that appealed to McConaughey was that he too enjoys sports and competition. Romantic comedies are designed for escapism but dramas depict real life, and McConaughey wanted to try his hand at something serious.

‘He was so dedicated,’ Rene Russo enthused to Rebecca Murray of About.com: Hollywood Movies about working with McConaughey. ‘It was unbelievable. He was so serious about this part. During rehearsals he would ask questions, he was just so into it. It’s wild working with him. You get the feeling that he’s like really in the film. The character has taken him over. That’s how much he’s in it. It was fascinating to watch. You always learn something from everybody, but he was just like “Whoa!”’

Part of McConaughey’s responsibility for the role was getting in shape. The Texan was portraying a quarterback and the one thing he hates about sports movies is seeing actors play sports people who don’t have the right physique for the part, so McConaughey was dedicated to making himself look like a quarterback. There is a leadership mentality to playing a sportsman. McConaughey enjoyed the physical and mental training that came with the role of Brandon Lang. In fact, McConaughey spent some time with the man who inspired the part; the real-life Brandon Lang. He listened to him and learned from his experiences. McConaughey tried to pick up on lines and listen to the way he spoke. He gained first-hand knowledge about the gambling industry and touting services and learned a few secrets. McConaughey saw his character not as a gambler but as a winner.

McConaughey, speaking to MovieWeb’s Evan ‘Mushy’ Jacobs, said: ‘I also did a lot of my own homework. Whether it was the football stuff, the actual playing of it, or calling a lot of these services on my own. And hearing different sales pitches, and types and Brandon’s… there’s all different kinds of ways you do want to hear that certainty, in that uncertain world. And that’s one of the lines in about the whole racket, yeah know [sic]? If the phone is ringing, that person on the other end of the line is looking for direction. So you’re already there. There’s some great stuff in the movie about, “the person’s already calling, TELL them what to do.” As for what Brandon’s pitch would be? Don’t be the sell, sell, sell guy. He just says, “Hey man, I’m gonna tell you the truth. Here’s what I know because I’ve played the game. I love the game. Now also, as well, both are true, if you want to make some money call the number at the bottom of the screen, let’s do it.” He didn’t see it as an act.’

In some respects McConaughey – as with any other actor – is a gambler. Every film he makes is a gamble. Will it be a success? Or will he lose and struggle to get another part? He bets on himself in that sense, so he is more in control of winning. When he plays a game of golf he bets with his brothers, but he’ll bet on himself too, so if he misses the shot the only person he’ll be bugged at is himself. By betting on himself it makes betting very simple which is the way he prefers it. He’s always been in a position where he’s had money that he can’t afford to lose, so if he slips up he can’t pay the rent or his bills. That’s a type of lifestyle he has always been drawn to.

There’s an emotional scene in the film where Pacino’s character fakes a heart attack. It was at a time in the story when Lang cares about Abrams. McConaughey, much like his character, doesn’t play games with people; especially with those you’re supposed to care about. You don’t play with God and you don’t tempt fate. McConaughey has a strict personal philosophy on that. He has a moral compass that he abides by. His character also doesn’t like playing around with life and death. It took McConaughey back to his childhood when his parents told him that lying will bite you in the ass one day.

McConaughey was in awe of Al Pacino, one of the greatest American actors alive, with a string of critically acclaimed movies to his name such as The Godfather, Serpico, Scent of a Woman and Heat. McConaughey told Evan ‘Mushy’ Jacobs of MovieWeb: ‘It’s like dancing, man. Dancing with a great partner. It’s fun. It’s free. It’s unexpected at all times. He gets on waves and he rides them all the way, sometimes they land in a perfect spot. Sometimes they don’t but he rides it. Every time. That’s one of the things I loved watching from the side. And also working with him, you give him something and you catch a wave. You don’t know where it’s going but while you’re doing it you’re not trying to stay ahead. And if you hit it, then you kind of have that feeling afterwards like, “Okay, I don’t know what that was but it worked.”’

It was a forty-three-day shoot, which was ideal for McConaughey. On some of the bigger films he’s starred in there’s been an awful lot of preparation time which can get very tiring, and there’s a lot of sitting around in between scenes with little to do. A tighter shoot, on the other hand, means there is more focus and time is more precious. There’s no time to hang around and think too deeply about a shot or sit back and talk about a scene. You show up, discuss the scene with the director and get in front of the camera and act. The actors showed up on set in the morning and worked for twelve-hour days throughout the shoot. It was hard work but it was a learning curve for all involved.

Two for the Money worked for McConaughey; from the pre-production to getting the cast grouped together to the shoot and into post-production. He also liked the director and the crew and thought there was a strong unity between all concerned. It had an independent feel to it where everyone got down to work and did their best to make a good film. The director gave his cast room to offer ideas and to see how the characters fitted in to the story before constructing the shots and setting up the cameras on set. There was vitality to the film, which McConaughey admired.

‘I think in a lot of ways it can encourage more and even better creativity because time is precious but you can’t be precious,’ McConaughey explained to Beth Accomando of KPBS on how constraints enrich creativity. ‘So sometimes the sun’s going down you have to combine two shots. Sometimes you have a scene and you don’t have time to shoot that scene. So how can we get across what we want in that next scene in this scene and get what we wanted in this scene, let’s combine them. You are always forced to compress, maybe you’re going from A to B to C to D, well how do you skip B – can you go from A to C? Or can we pick up B along the way and take it with us into C. You have to think about how to streamline it while still tell your story.’

The entertainment board Bodog sponsored the world premiere of the film, which was held in Beverly Hills on 26 September. The reviews and box office performance of the film were poor, however. McConaughey’s career at the box office was not going so well.

Simon Braund wrote in Empire: ‘Before you can say ‘mentor-protégé-surrogate-dad-dynamic’, Brandon (rechristened John Anthony by Walter because “Brandon lives at home with his mommy!”) hits a losing streak as disastrous as it is predictable, and the film careens across the border between mere silliness and outright “what-the?” absurdity with a flash of its arse to the customs officer.’

The A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias wrote: ‘Inevitably, the personal complications that infect Pacino and McConaughey’s relationship coincide with a losing streak that’s every bit as profound as the 80-per-cent record that brought them to glory. McConaughey’s side of the story brims with gambling-movie clichés about the vacancies that his short-term victories create as the moral decay sets in; he’s even given two separate personas, one the drawling, unpretentious quarterback from the sticks, and the other a fatuous, Benz-rolling city slicker named “John Anthony.”’

Although the reviews of Two for the Money were poor, the film picked up a cult fan base on DVD and fans occasionally chatted to McConaughey about it. The DVD is huge business with many fans getting introduced to movies via DVDs rather than the cinema, which is the more traditional route. For many people watching a DVD is far easier and more convenient than going to the cinema. A trip to the cinema is a social event – dating, family and friends socialising and so on, but some people just prefer to stay at home; plus it is cheaper. The idea of watching a film with two hundred other people just doesn’t appeal to everyone, so the DVD and pay-per-view and online markets have become a huge source of revenue for film studios.

McConaughey is fond of the film despite its lukewarm reception. He was trying to stay loyal to the big Hollywood studios with films such as Reign of Fire but venturing towards smaller dramas that meant more to him on a personal level. There was no set pattern to his career. He picked projects that he found interesting; the story and the characters had to appeal to him. Even though it would take time for critics and audiences to fully recognise his talents as a character actor, McConaughey could plausibly jump from a romantic comedy to a period drama to a military film. He had learned how to deal with fame and not allow it to take over his life. Some actors let it swallow them up and as a consequence enter a world of drugs, drink and other substances. McConaughey was at peace with himself and his career. His celebrity status was not that of megastars such as Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio, but he attracted a fair share of entertainment and gossip journalists and photographers who were interested in his latest squeeze or what fashion labels he was wearing. As far as mainstream audiences went, his career was going through a tumultuous period, which lacked focus and confidence. He was about to star in one of the worst films of his career, yet another rom-com, with a top-named TV actress after having appeared in a film – albeit not a very good one – with one of cinema’s greatest actors in Al Pacino.

McConaughey wasn’t simply making one film such as Two for the Money for his male fans and then a romantic comedy for his female followers. He’s drawn to films because of the characters and the story rather than the genre, though a successful film like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days allowed him to make smaller dramas. He spent much of the decade moving between the glossy Hollywood romances to the smaller almost independent-type dramas.

There is usually a formula to the romantic comedy: a couple gets together, breaks up and gets together again before the closing credits. Some films see the male protagonist begging on all fours to get back with the woman, but McConaughey never bought into that so in his rom-coms he tries to be a man’s man. He’s less interested in a film that’s about the battle of the sexes and more interested in one where the sexes are balanced. McConaughey tried to make his character not an outright deadbeat; he has sympathetic and empathic traits. He realises he messed up and tries to make amends but not by begging; it’s through choice, not desperation, that he chases after the woman. McConaughey’s view is that balancing the roles between the man and the women opens up the film to a male audience because the men can relate to the male protagonist.

By their very nature, romantic comedies are films that make a lot of money for the studios because they are accessible. Guys take their girls on dates, mothers take their daughters, and girlfriends go together and so on. Also, compared to action movies they’re a lot less expensive to make, yet the returns can be very high so they’re not as risky as other genres.

In 2006 Matthew co-starred with Sarah Jessica Parker in the rom-com Failure to Launch, which opened in the UK and US in March. A romantic comedy, McConaughey plays a thirty-five-year-old man named Tripp who still lives with his parents Al (Terry Bradshaw) and Sue (Kathy Bates) in New Orleans. Even his best friends, Demo (Bradley Cooper) and Ace (Justin Bartha), live with their parents, so he’s not too bothered. However, Tripp suspects his parents of setting him up with his dream girl Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker) so he’ll finally have to leave home. Paula is actually an expert hired by his parents to find out why he won’t leave home, and he ends up falling in love with her.

‘It’s a good romance and it’s got a lot of heart to it,’ McConaughey said to Empire. ‘I think SJP has great comedic timing. I think she’s got a real freshness and buoyancy. And she’s extremely cute. Kind of great sense of effervescence that’s nice about her.’

For the role of Tripp, McConaughey had lost some of the weight and muscle mass he’d gained for Two for the Money by doing lots of running and Frisbee throwing.

McConaughey thoroughly enjoyed the script when he first read it. It made him laugh out loud, not something he normally does. He felt there was more comedy in it than in other rom-coms. The film is not solely based on the male-female relationship; he liked the idea that his character has a problem but doesn’t think he does. Because of the loss of his fiancée in the past, Tripp struggles to move forward in life. His mum cooks for him and folds his clothes; his life is generally that of a teenager’s in many respects. There are still plenty of gimmicks and comedic scenes to keep the audience engaged in McConaughey’s character though.

McConaughey liked that Tripp wasn’t turned into a slacker and a bad son because he lives at home. Tripp is a good son, a good friend and a good employee. It plays into the recent phenomenon that is happening with adults who stay with their parents because of financial pressures or failed relationships. It happens with both men and women. In some cultures people don’t leave their parents’ house until they’re married. It often boils down to economics: some adults can’t afford to leave home and some are forced to move back because their general expenses and costs of living are too high.

‘The main thing I could understand is that he’s got a great relationship with his parents,’ McConaughey explained to Chud’s Devin Faraci his opinion of his character: ‘He had a great relationship with his friends. He’s a good friend to them and a good son. He loves women. One of the things why that was important and cool to me is that it would have been very easy to make the story that his parents want him out of the house because he’s a pain in the butt; but he’s not. They like him there, and he likes being there.’

One of the elements of the story that McConaughey liked about the script was that Tripp had never gotten over his true love. He had a woman who left him yet he still has love for her in his heart. Tripp hadn’t gone out and purposefully met a woman because he still had love for his ex. He’s a dignified guy, but he’s troubled. His parents want him to evolve and to open up his heart by sharing it with someone else. He needs to move on with his life and his parents allow that to happen. It’s not a heavy drama, and although it does try to tackle weighty issues that are relevant to many adults, it does so with humour.

Tripp thinks he’s got his situation under control but it turns out to be something that it isn’t and that’s where the comedy comes from. McConaughey understood that as soon as he’d read the script and knew how to handle his character. Also, like his character, McConaughey enjoys keeping his relationships in the fun zone. His view is that life is hard and you face many challenges on a daily basis and so a relationship with someone should be all about having fun together and, if it’s with the right person, looking forward to building a future together. At this time he was dating Penélope Cruz. They’d been together for almost two years and were still enjoying being with each other. They knew each other’s likes and dislikes and how to make each other laugh. They’d also learned how to deal with the physical distance if they were both working on separate projects in different parts of the country or the world at the same time.

One aspect of making a romantic comedy that McConaughey found challenging in some ways was keeping it buoyant. He wants to make it light. Acting as though you are in a heavy drama doesn’t work in this sort of genre so McConaughey learned to skim across the surface. In some respects he felt it had a similar vibe to How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, another film he enjoyed making.

‘You know what surprised me is he writes a lot,’ Parker said to Rebecca Murray of About.com: Hollywood Movies about McConaughey. ‘I didn’t know he was a writer. He writes a lot. He really works on the script a lot. He really thinks about it. He breaks it down. I guess what was surprising is that he was really into talking about it and working on it, and taking it apart and putting it back together. I probably would have – if you’d given me truth serum before the rehearsal process – probably thought it comes pretty easy to him, which it does at the same time. And he probably gets a script, you know, but no, he was much more interested in fixing and doing things to it that he felt were important for the story.’

The sailing scene in the film was fun to shoot. McConaughey went sailing before filming so he could get used to it. He’s very active and energetic and loves the outdoors. He’s not a great sailor, though, but his character thinks he is so that was fun to play. His co-star in the film found that he liked to be in charge, that he has sort of traditional ideas about that.

Parker had made a return to the big screen with the film, after becoming a household name with the hit TV series Sex and the City. McConaughey admitted he had a crush on her in the series and the cult film Honeymoon in Vegas, but sadly for him she’s been with actor Matthew Broderick for years. ‘He has a sort of easy, breezy quality about him,’ she said of McConaughey to The Cinema Source’s J.P. Mangalindan. ‘He’s very engaging and very effective on camera. It’s quite easy to flirt with him. Let’s just put it like this: it doesn’t take a lot of effort for him to do what he does.’

A trashy, throwaway film, Failure to Launch received poor reviews and grossed over $90 million worldwide with a $50 million budget. McConaughey’s career wasn’t going so well after the commercial failures of Sahara and Two for the Money, and now Failure to Launch. This once promising young good-looking actor with box office appeal was in dire need of a hit film.

The New York Times’ Stephen Holden wrote: ‘The director Tom Dey obviously cherishes 30s comedies, and he confidently guides a screenplay (by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember) that has some of the sass and bite of those oldies through the screwball rapids. It’s all about tone. And until the movie succumbs to sugar shock at the end, it remains brisk and tart. Mr. McConaughey and Ms. Parker (in a role not far removed from Carrie Bradshaw) make well-matched sparring partners.’

Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote: ‘If, for example, you like McConaughey’s affect of sexy, sleepy-eyed drawl – is he toasted, or just a sun-kissed Texan? – then you are meant to like Tripp, even though screenwriters Tom J. Astle and sitcom-savvy Matt Ember abandon all hope of squaring the childish, spoiled-by-Mom slacker that Tripp appears to be pre-Paula with the far more competent, complicated, and sensitive thirtysomething adult he proves himself to be later on. This character is a bundle of What-If-We-Made-Hims who dribbles away his leisure with similarly unattached goofball pals, yet also takes seriously his responsibilities to a jaunty African-American boy he calls his nephew. And little black kids don’t appear for nothing in a white creampuff comedy like this.’

Total Film said: ‘Failure to Launch is a sometimes jarring mixture of Farrelly brothers-style slapstick, amusing musings on what it means to grow up and schmaltzy relationship patter. Parker aces in a role seemingly written for Jennifer Aniston, but McConaughey, alas, has the sexual charisma of a battered cod.’

How does McConaughey react to negative feedback?

‘There are good bad reviews and there are bad bad reviews,’ he explained to The Tech’s Alison C. Lewis. ‘The good ones are very critical, very constructive. The [writers of the] bad ones don’t have critical right. They just like to hear themselves talk. They were just having a bad day.’

McConaughey was dating Penélope Cruz, the stunning Spanish actress and model he’d met when filming Sahara. ‘There’s a bit of a language barrier, but it’s like poetry when it happens,’ he admitted to Details’ Bart Blasengame. ‘What I really love about her is that she sees everything for the first time, every time. And she’s one of the best listeners I’ve ever met. She’s not a right-and-wronger.’

They’d gone to Mexico together after filming Failure to Launch. McConaughey relaxed there. He ran each day, took the dogs for walks, swam, sat on the beach and read, went out for dinner and had dances and massages and generally enjoyed himself with his on-off girlfriend. McConaughey spoke to Metro about Cruz’s opinion of McConaughey’s less than glamorous Airstream. ‘She likes it. It’s not very hi-tech but it has got running water – if I have a place to hook up – and a stove you can cook on or you just build a fire. It has everything you need. It’s very relaxing and highly luxurious – if you want a new front yard every morning, or a new view over a river or over a new ocean, you can get it.’

Questions came up in the press as to how serious the relationship was. Would they live together? McConaughey has admitted he wouldn’t be the easiest guy to live with. Travelling is his favourite thing to do and in many respects he is a very adaptable guy. He tries to stay in every place he visits long enough to absorb the culture and way of life of the residents. He loves Spain, Cruz’s native country, and even mentioned living there.

Though he has dated many beautiful women, his life was very much that of a bachelor’s. He lived alone, ran his own business and often worked out and travelled alone. The paparazzi usually snapped pictures of him running on a beach with his shirt off, or working out by Venice beach or somewhere equally beautiful in Southern California. His love of the great outdoors – either outdoor pursuits such as hiking or working out as opposed to exercising in the gym – and working out goes back to his childhood when Kay, his mother, wouldn’t let him stay indoors during daylight hours. ‘It’s always been a lifestyle,’ he said to Men’s Fitness writer Joe Warner. ‘Then it became something that was like, “Hey, it’s also good for my job.” I’m not a professional athlete, but I have a job where I prefer to look good and be as healthy as possible.’

In the 1990s he tried his hand at thrillers, action, science-fiction and dramas; mostly serious films that were cold, but when he did The Wedding Planner, which is something light and fluffy, he realised he could make a whole lot of money. He got famous over the weekend after A Time to Kill and then he starred in films that he wanted to do because the director and the story meant something to him. The rom-coms didn’t mean anything to him as such; they just made him very rich and raised his profile. The studios offered him fewer dramas as a consequence, and films such as The Newton Boys and Two for the Money didn’t make much in box office receipts or see the studios come to him, but they were fun to make.

McConaughey then went on to star as Marshall head football coach Jack Lengyel in the film We Are Marshall, which opened in US cinemas in December 2006 and went straight to DVD in most foreign countries. Directed by Charlie’s Angels director McG, We Are Marshall sees former Party of Five actor Matthew Fox as assistant coach William ‘Red’ Dawson as the pair try to rebuild the Marshall University Thundering Herd football team after the 1970 plane crash that killed thirty-seven football players, five coaches, two athletic figures, the athletic director, twenty-five boosters and the five members of the airplane crew. There were no survivors aboard the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 that transported the team to Greenville, North Carolina, via Stallings Field in Kinston, North Carolina.

It is the story of the year after the accident when the town was divided between those who wanted to drop the program and go out gracefully and those who wanted to fight and carry it on. It wasn’t about winning but about keeping the spirit alive in honour of those who lost their lives. McConaughey was more than pleased to be part of the drama given the nature of the story and his love of sports. It was an interesting role for him to play, being a coach rather than a player given his obvious athleticism. He was thirty-seven when he made the film and in fantastic shape.

It’s an outsider’s film and as such they wanted to do two things: make it as honourable as possible so as not to upset the relatives and local townsfolk and to bring the story to those who did not know about it. McConaughey plays the outsider who was able to be part of the healing process and manage a tough job at the same time. His agenda was never to heal the town but to do his job, which was coaching.

‘A lot of it for me with Jack was the rhythm of his speech,’ said McConaughey to Andrea Tuccillo of The Cinema Source. ‘That’s where it started for me as far as from the outside in. Also, people in general sort of have three walks. You’ve got the pelvis walk, the heart walk, or the head walk. And Lengyel was a head first guy, he always led with his chin. So I think that just worked into a sort of physicality that allowed a conduit for me to understand him and also give my portrayal of the guy.’

Filming began in Huntington, West Virginia on 3 April and was completed a few months later in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s a tragic story and they wanted to tell it as truthfully as possible, which is why they chose to film it in the same West Virginian town where the actual events occurred. Naturally it brought a lot of scepticism from the locals. The tragedy happened thirty-five years before the film was made, but because it was such a major catastrophe it was still fresh in peoples’ minds. A couple of weeks into filming and the locals started to visit the set and were shown script pages by the crew to see how scenes were being shot. The crew wanted the locals to see they were doing the story justice.

‘I got knocked on my butt the first day of filming. We had the kids do a drill, and I went to give one a chuck and I landed flat on my keister,’ McConaughey admitted to People magazine’s Natasha Stoynoff.

The film premiered at the Keith Albee Theatre in Huntington on 12 December 2006 and special commemorative screenings were held at Pullman Square. The film caused controversy because aspects of the storyline were changed for dramatic purposes, which is typical of Hollywood when dealing with real life events as previously seen with U-571. The producers, Deborah Novak and John Witek, of the 2000 documentary Marshall University: Ashes to Glory filed a $40 million lawsuit against Warner Bros. and others associated with the film citing fraud, copyright infringement and breach of contract. The case was dismissed in October 2008.

‘From my experience, in a true story there’s obviously a blueprint,’ McConaughey explained to Andrea Tuccillo of The Cinema Source. ‘So you have a certain responsibility. Not necessarily to go out and imitate what happened but to emulate what happened and to recognize that you’re bringing it down to two hours of celluloid.’

The film was not a box office hit (its budget was $65 million but it grossed little more than $40 million) but McConaughey’s performance won acclaim from critics who marked it as the film’s highlight. After the risible Failure to Launch, McConaughey had (sort of) saved his credentials with this excellent albeit sadly forgotten little drama.

Roger Moore from the Orlando Sentinel gave it four stars out of five and said in his review that ‘We Are Marshall (it’s the rally cry of the team) doesn’t always have a handle on the grief, but it does keep emotions close to the surface. That allows McConaughey to be the most refreshing, funny and believable he ever has been.’

Frank Lovece of Film Journal International said: ‘Leaving aside Matthew McConaughey’s quirky performance as replacement coach Jack Lengyel – which actually does grow on you – yes. Very much so. Despite what qualms one might have had about pretentiously named ex-music-video director McG (a.k.a. Joseph McGinty Nichol of Kalamazoo, Michigan), whose only previous features are the two blustery Charlie’s Angels movies, the guy clearly has enough human empathy and experience that his film conveys real emotion and not schmaltz.’

Empire’s Helen O’Hara said: ‘It tries hard to tug the heartstrings, but between McConaughey’s eccentric mugging, director McG’s uninspired helming and endless scenes of people coping with unbearable tragedy, it doesn’t succeed.’

Still, despite the poor box office performance McConaughey was proud to be part of the film. ‘I’d do movies like Marshall and Two for the Money that might look more like meter readers, and, as far as my stock in Hollywood, someone would go, “He’s got a [price] quote for a romantic-comedy, but he don’t get that quote for [dramas]. You want to do that movie, you’ve got to take a pay cut for us to take a chance.”’

That same year he provided voiceover work in an ad campaign for the Peace Corps and on 21 January 2008 McConaughey became the new spokesman for the national radio campaign ‘Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner’ replacing actor Sam Elliot. The biggest piece of news came in January when he announced via his blog, ‘My girlfriend Camila [Alves] and I made a baby together…its 3 months growin in her womb and all looks healthy…we are stoked and wowed.’

As if The Wedding Planner, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Failure to Launch were not embarrassing enough, McConaughey was cast as Benjamin ‘Finn’ Finnegan in Fool’s Gold. He is a treasure hunter on a quest to find treasure from a Spanish galleon called the Aurelia that was lost at sea with the 1715 Treasure Fleet. His wife Tess (played by Kate Hudson, his How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days co-star) divorces him and finds a job as a steward on board an expensive yacht owned by multi-millionaire Nigel Honeycutt, played by Donald Sutherland. Finn’s coordinates take him to the yacht, The Precious Gem, and he convinces Honeycutt, his daughter, Gemma, and Tess, to help him find the treasure which ultimately helps Tess and Finn rekindle their estranged relationship. Along the way they meet gangsters Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart) and Moe Fitch (Ray Winstone) who are also after the treasure.

McConaughey and Hudson had a fantastic rapport on set, often joking with each other and having fun on the Australian beaches. They had wanted to work together again and a few opportunities had come up, but Fool’s Gold felt like the perfect project for a second collaboration between the two big screen actors. McConaughey knew there’d be people out there who wanted to see them pair up on screen for a second time and Fool’s Gold was not only perfect for the script but also the exotic locations. The pair felt it was an extension of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, yet at the same time it was a different story with two different characters.

McConaughey spoke to IndieLondon about his friendship with Hudson. The pair are more like sibling rivals than anything else, often winding each other up. ‘We’re a pain in each other’s ass,’ he admitted, ‘but that’s a part of what works, I think, seeing us on screen in our relationship in real life. She said before: “We love each other but we don’t like each other the whole time.” And it’s still true. We fight well, and we flirt well.’

‘I think it’s just a personal thing, our relationship. We can drive each other crazy,’ explained Hudson at an LA press junket. ‘It’s also one of those things where it is like when you start knowing someone so well that you love them, like my brothers or even in relationships, the things that drive you crazy, you love even the things that drive you crazy about them.’

It was easy for the pair to reconnect. Working together again felt right. They love each other but also hate each other. There’s certainly a lot of respect for each other’s talents.

The film was scheduled to be shot in the Caribbean but Warner Bros. and director Andy Tennant decided to shoot in Queensland, Australia to avoid the hurricane season, which was likely to disrupt shooting. Scenes were filmed in Port Douglas, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Hamilton Island, Lizard Island, Airlie Beach and Hervey Bay, as well as Batt Reef, which is where Australia’s real life Crocodile Dundee Steve Irwin died from a stingray barb in 2006. Indoor scenes were filmed on the Warner Bros. studio lot.

While staying at a luxury home in Port Douglas, McConaughey had a python in his backyard. Some days he went out diving and even swimming with a dugong, a large marine mammal. Two crew members, in fact, were stung by Irukandji jellyfish which prompted some scenes to be filmed in the Caribbean because the actors were so frightened of the venomous creatures in the water.

McConaughey spoke at the world premiere of the movie about the indigenous wildlife. ‘I had two pythons in my tree where I was living,’ he said to journalist Rebecca Murray of About.com: Hollywood Movies. ‘Two pythons – eight and half-foot amethystine pythons living in a coconut tree right out in front of my spot. Everything’s cool when I see he’s in the tree everyday, but then I come home after a month and he’s gone. Now you don’t sleep so well. Checking under the bed, under the mattress, in every single closet and I couldn’t find that SOB. So, it was a wild shoot. We had sharks. I’m diving and I see bull sharks coming by. Thankfully we weren’t on the menu.’

Sahara and We Are Marshall both faced lawsuits and Fool’s Gold was no different. Warner Bros. were sued in 2011 by Canadian writer Lou Boudreau who alleged copyright infringement by the director and two others over the authorship of the script. Comment was not made by Warner Bros.

‘Rom-coms are hard in a lot of ways: they’re built to be buoyant,’ McConaughey told The Guardian’s Andrew Pulver in a 2012 interview. ‘It’s easy to demean them. I did a few romantic comedies. I enjoyed them. They paid well; they were fun. I didn’t know if I wanted to do any more. I decided to sit out, and I had to endure for a while. Another one comes with a big old paycheck; I had to say no. I was looking for something to be turned on by.’

‘They’re a staple of American cinema,’ said director-cowriter Andy Tennant, the man behind Ever After and Hitch, to Rich Cline of Shadows on the Wall about the often derided rom-com genre. ‘They’re about people, and I like that. This particular one is about marriage – they want to kill each other, and then in the final moments they get to a point where they have to decide what’s really important. And if you can say something like that and make people laugh, that’s great!’

‘This isn’t one of those films where I get to be the white knight in shining armour and win the fights,’ McConaughey said to IndieLondon, ‘I’m actually the screw up who gets my butt kicked a lot and happens to get the gold and the girl in the end. It was fun.’

There’s a great deal of honesty and respect between McConaughey and Hudson which is sometimes hard to come by between two major Hollywood actors because it’s often the case that egos get in the way. Brit actor Ray Winstone was a good laugh, too, with his screwball English sense of humour.

‘It just felt like it was – the relationship felt right, because it was kind of an extension of what worked with How to Lose a Guy but at the same time it was completely different – two totally different characters,’ Hudson explained to Sheila Roberts of Movies Online.

The underwater scenes in the ocean proved difficult for cast and crew. They were taken through several emergency procedures, which lasted throughout the final month of filming. The entourage of cast and crew underwater was almost as large as that on land. They had to be sharp working underwater; there couldn’t be any laziness or fooling around involved. It was too dangerous. The film made it look as though the underwater scene wasn’t one take, but it was. It was hard to see (let alone breathe) in the ocean so filming was tough. The hardest part for Hudson was wrapping herself around the cannon. There was a mechanism close by which created the wave but it was scary for her as she struggled to see. She was a little nervous about it, though there were people on hand underwater to help her. There was a hand signal that was used if ever Hudson or McConaughey wanted to breathe; with that someone would go down with a tank of oxygen and share it with them.

For McConaughey, the underwater acting scenes were difficult to do: he learned that you had to choreograph the scenes thoroughly before filming because you might only get one chance to film them. He knew that you just had to go down, trust your gear, trust the people around you and concentrate on the job.

One reason why he chose dramas like Two for the Money and We Are Marshall was so that he could avoid being pigeonholed. ‘Some of my most successful films have been romantic comedies,’ he admitted to Chud’s Devin Faraci, ‘and they have, absolutely, offered me more opportunities to develop more things that are personal. It makes it a whole lot easier if this film does well for me to get something like The Loop made for ten million dollars. It’s not something people read and go, “Oh I can’t wait to throw money at that.” It’s a very peculiar, weird mystery. I really want to do it, but there’s no way I would be able to do it if I didn’t have successful box office.’

Fool’s Gold was released February 2008 in the US and in the UK in April. The film’s budget was $70 million and it made over $110 in box office receipts, but reviews were bad with critics lambasting Hudson’s performance and saying McConaughey used the story as an excuse to expose his chest. McConaughey, however, was enthusiastic about the film’s simple premise and knew his fans and admirers would enjoy the flick, even if the critics took every opportunity to shred it to pieces.

Brian Lowry of Variety said ‘The lure of Matthew McConaughey shirtless for extended stretches doubtless has some marketing value, but after that, Fool’s Gold offers small compensation.’

The New York Times’ A.O. Scott wrote: ‘If only this hodgepodge offered more fun and less of the kind of frantic creative desperation that tries to pass itself off as giddy comic exuberance. Mr. McConaughey and Ms. Hudson, who were less than electrifying in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, appear to be suffering through a class in remedial chemistry, which they barely pass.’

Simon Braund of Empire magazine wrote: ‘Absolute tosh. A ridiculous, unerringly tedious plot is weighed down by listless performances from a cast who clearly wished they were somewhere else, despite the sumptuous location.’

Derek Adams of Time Out in London was equally dismissive: ‘We’ve all seen this kind of scenario in umpteen treasure trovers, yet what makes Fool’s Gold at least vaguely watchable is the presence of Hudson, who shares many of her mother Goldie Hawn’s more likeable comedic skills. It’s the badly timed pratfalls that bother most: aside from one laugh-out-loud moment involving Hudson thwacking McConaughey across the head with a borrowed walking stick, they are almost universally insipid.’

Though the reviews were bad, the box office was good and it was obvious people wanted to see McConaughey and Hudson onscreen together again. They have a lot of respect for each other off screen, too. ‘I think if it works,’ McConaughey explained to Movies Online’s Sheila Roberts, ‘as it did in How to Lose a Guy, I mean, in the same way we were looking for, anticipating finding the right thing, because we wanted to get together again. I think there are definitely people out there that want to see us get back together again. I don’t know how they are going to do it, but [they] want to see them together again in the same way as we wanted to. It was just finding the right thing. How many years was it between?’

*****

McConaughey knew that his good looks and body got him jobs, and if having his shirt off would help make/sell the film, then he’d do it. McConaughey is his own creation; he follows his own path. Part commercial cop-out, part beat poet, part hippie, he’s an enigma, yet one that seems so familiar.

Throughout the years McConaughey has learned how to live a relatively private life. He knows all too well that Hollywood is a fantasy land and that people there live in a different world than the rest of us, so when he feels like he’s had enough he hits the road for another trip or he goes back to Texas. How he handles the paparazzi entirely depends on who he is with – like many celebrities he doesn’t like to be bothered when he’s with his family but if he’s with his buddies he knows how to humour the paps. If he didn’t like the fame, he wouldn’t go out – he’d rent a palace and hire three bodyguards and end up like Phil Spector or Michael Jackson – but he’s more humble and less paranoid. McConaughey has a rational, realistic approach to fame.

‘…people see Matthew out always doing something,’ Kate Hudson explained to Rebecca Murray of About.com: Hollywood Movies, ‘whether it be out dancing at a bar or beaching around or taking a hike with some crazy bandana on – that was a good one. I think that, like anything, people take their image and what they want someone else to be and people just run with it. And when you really know the person and really love the person, you recognize that that person is like nothing that people really want them [to be].’

To keep up with the challenging nature of his job and balancing his home life with his career, working out and staying in shape was paramount. His trainer Peter Park, whom he met through his Texan buddy Lance Armstrong, helps him with weights (80–84 kg), press-ups, squats, hand walks, tree branch pull-ups and traffic-light lunges. McConaughey’s fitness is incredible, sometimes he even worked out with Armstrong and while he may not be as fit as the now-disgraced cyclist McConaughey can certainly hold his own. His workouts often depend on the nature of the film he’s making at the time. He likes the challenging exercises and sometimes takes his bike out for a ride. He hates the gym and much prefers being outdoors. If he finds a weak spot on his body, he wants to strengthen it. For a film such as Fool’s Gold, it was important to the role to be in good shape.

‘One of the things is that I try to do it outdoors as much as possible,’ he said to People magazine. ‘I try to change up my route, and if I’m going down a road and I come across a new road or a new trail, I’ll always say, “We’ll take that one. Let’s see where we end up.” Sometimes it can get into a lot longer run than I wanted. I’ll be like, “Damn! I’ve got to find my way home.”’

Since he first began his acting career, McConaughey has mixed it up by taking roles that were always different from ones that he’d had before. He enjoys acting and the luxuries that come with it, but his main aim has always been to spice things up.

After Owen Wilson’s attempted suicide in August 2007, McConaughey replaced him in Ben Stiller’s action farce Tropic Thunder, which opened in US cinemas in August 2008 and later in the UK in September. Tropic Thunder isn’t a McConaughey film but he was pleased to be part of the ensemble cast nonetheless. The film stars Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr with co-stars Steve Coogan, Jay Baruchel, Brandon T. Jackson, Bill Hader and Nick Nolte.

‘Tropic Thunder was a different kind of comedic role,’ McConaughey told Caitlin Martis of The Film Stage. ‘It was fun to play a character and not characterise it, but it’s a little of that. There’s a character there, it’s not me being funny. It’s a character and hopefully being funny and I really like comedy. I am really turned on by comedy. I think it’s really fun and I like the timing of comedy. And that was sort of a fictitious guy they said it was based on, but it was fun playing with the imagination.’

Directed by and starring Dodgeball actor Stiller, it is a satire of Vietnam War films such as Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now and Platoon that were popular in the late 1970s and 1980s. McConaughey plays Rick ‘Pecker’ Peck, Tugg Speedman’s (Ben Stiller) agent and best buddy. Speedman is sort of a young Sylvester Stallone-type action movie star who was once the world’s biggest action hero because of the Scorcher franchise, but his career stalled due to box office bombs. The film’s premise is essentially that a group of pampered actors are making a fictional Vietnam War film; only when the director drops them in the middle of the jungle and then gets killed, they are forced to rely on their acting skills in order to survive. Filming took place on the Hawaiian island of Kauai over 13 weeks in 2007.

It received good reviews from critics and was a box office hit, making over $180 million from a $90 million budget. However, it was not marketed as a McConaughey film – his role is only small – so he was still in desperate need of a hit film of his own to rejuvenate his flagging career.

The Observer’s Phillip French wrote: ‘Stiller and Co toy with these resonant notions rather than examining them, but the rich confusion of themes and aims saves the film from being merely a series of spoofs and sketches like Airplane and Naked Gun. Yet with its Oscar-night coda, the film is ultimately an affectionate celebration of Hollywood values rather than something truly subversive like Sunset Boulevard.’

McConaughey’s personal life was in bloom – as was his bank balance – from the success of Fool’s Gold. His partner, Brazilian model Camila Alves McConaughey, whom he would shortly have children with and would later marry, was very supportive of his career. They had met at a bar on Sunset Boulevard in 2006 after his relationship with Penélope Cruz ended.

‘I met her in a club on Sunset [Boulevard], of all places,’ he admitted to Vogue’s John Powers. ‘The first time I saw her walk across the room, I didn’t say, “Who is that?” I said, “What is that?” The way she moved, I could see a person who knows who they are. There’s a person who spends time with herself, and is not advertising for this world, and is not asking permission. From that night I haven’t been on a date with anyone else.’

They became friends and didn’t exclusively date until a year and a half later. Alves arrived in the US aged fifteen to visit her aunt and never left. She started modelling in her teens and worked as a TV presenter and designed handbags with her mother. Having a family changed everything for Matthew. ‘One thing I always knew I wanted to be, since I was eight years old, I knew I wanted to be a father,’ he said to the The Scotsman in 2012. ‘I didn’t know what I wanted to be. When I was twenty years old, I didn’t know what I wanted for a career. But I knew I wanted to be a father. It has been the thing that, since I was very young, I looked up to. The men I looked up to the most were fathers – men who raised good kids.’

Their eldest Levi Alves McConaughey was born on 7 July 2008, weighing in at 7 lb, 4 oz. McConaughey spoke about his excitement for impending fatherhood in early 2008 to IndieLondon: ‘We’re six months into it, and everything’s healthy so far. We don’t know if it’s going to be a boy or a girl, and we’ll find out the day that he or she greets the day. But I’m excited. It’s going to be a new chapter.’

OK! Magazine paid $3 million in mid-2008 for the first photos of McConaughey, then thirty-eight, with his wife and their newborn child, Levi, then just two weeks old. McConaughey bragged at the time of playing Brazilian music for fourteen hours straight during labour. The money from the OK! shoot went to j.k. livin, which is a non-profit company. There had been photographers outside the McConaughey family home for weeks desperately hoping to catch that first shot of the baby. The McConaughey’s decided to beat them to it. As soon as the OK! pics made the Internet that was it for the paparazzi.

‘Bringing a baby into the world is something I’ve always wanted,’ he’s quoted as saying in the Daily Mail in 2008, ‘and now I’m completely ready for my life to start revolving around another human being. I carefully maintain relationships and friendships. I’m committed to my acting career. But to be the architect of a little creature’s life is my next big adventure and I can’t wait for it to begin.’

Becoming a father was a great new chapter in his life. He told People’s Brenda Rodriguez that as a mother Camila has a ‘real strong sense of calm’. He added: ‘We have a good flow, and neither one of us wants the other one to change. We’ve both said it, if we did change, that could be a problem! We love each other for who we are.’

When McConaughey was asked by Movies Online’s Sheila Roberts in 2008 if he anticipated a change of lifestyle after he became a dad, he responded: ‘You know my instincts will take over when the young one greets the world. One thing I’ve heard that’s consistent – and I’ve got a lot of great moms and dads around me from my own to elders to peers of mine – is that all the grand plans you want to make, you might as well throw them out buddy, because it doesn’t happen like that.’

Five years before the birth of his first child McConaughey reckoned that if he were to have a wife and child then he wouldn’t want to live in Hollywood, instead he’d rather pack up and move back to Texas and do something else, but he’d turned that around. Now he chose to continue to act while juggling family life and living in Southern California and Texas.

We are the architects of our lives; everyone has dreams, ambitions and desires. McConaughey had new projects on the go and ideas about what he wanted to do with his career but being a father changed everything for him. He knew that raising a child was going to be his greatest achievement over anything else. To raise a healthy child and bring him up the right way, and then let him venture into the world as an adult with the knowledge that he had gained from his father, was going to be McConaughey’s finest goal in life. His days as the lone contemplative travelling man were over and so were his days as a bachelor and single Hollywood hunk. Being a father had changed everything for him. Raising a child would be his proudest achievement over anything he’d managed to succeed at in his film career.

‘I think he will be an incredible dad,’ McConaughey’s co-star of two films, Kate Hudson, said to Sheila Roberts of Movies Online back in 2008. Their home life was simple: Camila wakes up first before McConaughey gets up and makes a breakfast shake. They’ll feed Levi a shake, put some music on and play with Levi. He’ll stand on his mum or dad’s chest and start dancing. He started learning Portuguese words as soon as he could talk. Levi wasn’t a big fan of baby speak; he tended to look at his parents as though he was wondering what on earth was going on. ‘Levi is into everything. You don’t go out and walk in the backyard and daydream for five seconds or they’re on top of the house,’ McConaughey said to late night US talk show host Jay Leno.

Aside from her obvious good looks and personality, what attracted McConaughey to Camila? What does McConaughey look for in a woman? ‘A sense of humour,’ he told the UK’s Metro newspaper in 2006. ‘Respect for themselves and respect for others and a certain amount of talent in whatever area they want to work in. Knowing what she does and doesn’t want. You’ve gotta have soul to be sexy. It’s more than a snapshot. When I see grace in a woman, that’s very sexy. You can tell by how someone moves or their rhythm.’

How does he cope with being a celebrity and going out in public? Some celebrities are closely guarded by bodyguards and assistants and either avoid going out in public or cause a scene with their entourage; others prefer to remain low key. McConaughey has learned how to carry himself in public. He explained this to Chud’s Devin Faraci: ‘…sometimes someone will walk up to me and I’ll say, “Not right now. I’m thinking.” Honestly. I’ll be working on something and someone will walk up to me and, not being rude, I’ll say, “Not right now, I’m eating.” Or, “I’m going to a movie.” Sometimes you have to remind people why you’re here. Like at the airport – I have to catch the flight. If they say you’re being rude, you say, “Wait, what are you doing here? Don’t you have to catch a flight too?” And then they laugh and you move on. But no, going out in public for me is something I’ve practiced and not ever will not do.’

His production company, j.k. livin, is based in Venice Beach, California with nine staff. His long time business partner Gus Gustawes was also on hand, as was John Chaney, his personal assistant of many years. McConaughey prefers to surround himself with trusted friends and associates rather than the usual ‘hangers on’ that are so prevalent in Hollywood. At this juncture, McConaughey was raking in around $8 million per film and his production company was making preparations for his next acting ventures, and for the forthcoming release of a small film called Surfer, Dude; the first film j.k. livin had made entirely in-house. In a profile of McConaughey in Texas Monthly in October 2008, journalist John Spong describes the offices in these terms: ‘With dark hardwood floors and exposed brick, the glassed-in offices looked down on an open lobby. The walls held framed script pages and large posters from McConaughey’s favourite movies – Dino De Laurentiis’s King Kong, S.R. Bindler’s Hands on a Hard Body, his own Sahara. A twenty-foot-tall screen on one side of the room showed a Cubs game.’

Surfer, Dude had a limited release in the US in September 2008 and went straight to DVD in most foreign countries. The film was co-produced by McConaughey who takes the title role of Steve Addington, a surfer who’s having a soul-searching existential crisis after he can’t catch a wave for over a month.

McConaughey spoke to Beth Accomando of KPBS about his reasons for producing the project: ‘As an actor I’m hired to show up, hit my mark, know my stuff; if it’s a big movie I work three months and I’m gone. There are movies that I’ve seen and I go, “Aahhh, that was better than I thought it was going to be.” But there are a lot of movies where, “Oh man there must be something on the cutting room floor that we’re never going to see in there.” So I was like I want to get into the pre-production of it, the production of it, and the post-production so at the end of the day I can look in the mirror and go, “Yup, now I got a big responsibility.” Like it or not like it, I know that I had my hands in the clay the whole time and I was responsible for a lot of it. I learned so much in this thing. I learned that I definitely don’t want to produce every movie that I’m a part of. It’s hard and it’s long. But it was stuff you can’t be taught; you can’t read it in a book.’

Directed by S.R. Bindler, who had made mostly music documentaries and commercials since making the 1996 documentary Hands on a Hard Body, the critically acclaimed Texan film, and co-starring Woody Harrelson, Surfer, Dude has long been forgotten about. Bindler and McConaughey have been friends since they sat next to each other in art class at high school in 1985. ‘He [Bindler] was already doing a lot of writing and a big movie buff,’ McConaughey said to Rebecca Murray of About.com: Hollywood Movies. ‘I wasn’t, and we became friends then and we started swapping out our weekends. On Friday night, he’d go out with me and we’d go party and on Saturday night I’d go to his place and we’d get some grub and then watch a movie. And so he started introducing me to films.’

The script was optioned in 1998, but then it had rewrites in 2004 and 2005 before McConaughey and Bindler came on board. They rewrote the script until they were both happy with it and then shopped it around LA. It was a tough film for the pair to finance. They had wanted to work together for a while but had to find a project that didn’t cost $40 million. They managed to scrape together the $6 million for this film and only had twenty-eight days to shoot it. It’s a low budget film as far as Hollywood is concerned. It’s almost like guerrilla-style filmmaking or something from student film – McConaughey understands that on films with tight schedules you spend less time in your trailer because you do a scene, go back to your trailer so the cameras can quickly be set up for the next scene. Because of the weather and the ambitious nature of the script, and with several locations, it meant there were a lot of camera setups in and around the Malibu area. Jimmy Skotchdopole, the producer, and also the location producer, were vital in helping them stick to the limited budget.

Bindler spoke to Collider’s Charlie Mihelich about the central theme that brought the cast and crew together: ‘Matthew and I grew up in the country and got to be around nature, and the central theme for me was what is the cost when nature goes away? Which is something we’re all going through right now.’

Trailers become a home away from home for many actors on set. ‘The unsaid rule for living in a trailer park is: If the door’s shut, don’t come a-knockin’,’ McConaughey explained to Details’ Bart Blasengame. ‘But if it’s open and you’re walkin’ by, feel free to say hello.’

Surfer, Dude has got the j.k. livin stamp all over it. McConaughey spoke to Rebecca Murray of About.com: Hollywood Movies about the company and his family’s part in the making of Surfer, Dude, which really was a family affair. ‘My brother Rooster helped out, my nephew helped out, my mom was always kind of there helping out. We had a lot of thank-yous to all of our family members because … it wasn’t a big studio project that we just had them bankrolling the thing. So this was more like door-to-door sales. We had to go run around town to try and get the money and then to get it made we had, get people to work for scale.’

McConaughey wanted the film to have a seventies feel it to. He wanted the joints that the characters smoke to be almost an extension of their hands, where nobody passed judgement. It was who they are. It’s a situation where if they don’t smoke they go a little crazy. It’s the antithesis of what most comedies do today which tend to be gross-out films or tongue-in-cheek comedies.

McConaughey spends most of the film shirtless. Was it a parody of the media’s seeming obsession with him having his shirt off all the time? ‘It’s sort of a wink, you know, to pop the bubble, and say “Guess what? Now I’ve had a whole movie to do it” and sort of get the joke,’ he said to Charlie Mihelich of Collider. ‘I found a character who I got to know for twenty-eight days, shooting wise, and surfing, and there was also reason behind it. It was not to paradise anything. I mean, the stuff about me being shirtless in the current culture came from working on this movie. It happened at this time. So we found a character who never wears a shirt and shoes. That’s nothing but a black and white bathing suit, which is kind of like a jail because there are no waves. That’s all part of the wink.’

Some people suggested that Surfer, Dude was McConaughey’s version of Ocean’s Eleven in that he’s just hanging out with his buddies such as Woody Harrelson or Texan country hero Willie Nelson. It was essentially a low budget film that McConaughey made with his friends and acquaintances, though in some respects it was more like Robert Altman’s Nashville than anything else.

‘Like, Woody (Harrelson) came in, and Willie (Nelson) came in, and all us lived…there’s about sixteen trailers we had in a trailer park,’ McConaughey told Bullz-Eye’s Will Harris, ‘so it really felt like that old commune feeling that you got from the Altman films. We wanted that feeling where we woke up in the morning, and we drove just down the street, and we were on the set, which was the beach. And we came home after work, and everybody kinda congregated, laughed about the day, had a cocktail, ate some dinner, crashed, and got up and did it again. It was a real feeling of a traveling circus…so, yeah, that’s a fair description.’

It’s a very planet-friendly film and Harrelson and Nelson are proponents of environmentally friendly projects so they were keen to work on the project. They also liked the idea that Surfer, Dude is about a bunch of misfits. McConaughey and Bindler were not trying to preach any messages with the film, though. They liked the idea of an organic character who leads a very simple life in a complicated world. Their idea was to see what could happen to make his life complicated and this came in the form of taking away the wave. He’s not angry because of a family illness or anything, but because he can’t surf. It’s almost a throwback to 1980s goofball films such as Caddyshack where the characters are authentic and sincere, but they’re also misfits and somewhat naïve.

McConaughey hadn’t surfed before but when he began practicing for the film he really enjoyed it and went surfing a few times after filming was completed. He liked the idea that to surf there’s no membership card or club, you can just go and catch the waves. There’s something very free and earthly about it.

There is a scene in the film where McConaughey plays the didgeridoo naked; surely a homage to the 1999 incident where he was caught playing the bongos au naturel by the police after neighbours filed a noise complaint. McConaughey had been in Australia so he picked up a didgeridoo and started playing it. He thought it would be funny to add it to the film. It’s an odd instrument that is not very well-known in America, so he wanted to broaden its fan base.

The Los Angeles Times’ Daniel Ordona wrote: ‘The film is awash in doobies and breasts, clichéd cinematic language and clumsy exposition. It’s reminiscent of the stoner-culture movies of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s but without the naïve fun.’

Austin Chronicles’ Kimberley Jones was equally unenthused: ‘From Hands on a Hard Body to an 89-minute ogling of another hard body: It boggles the mind that eleven years after his engrossing documentary about an endurance competition to win a truck in Longview, Texas, filmmaker Bindler has channelled his talents into this regrettable comedy.’

The money McConaughey was making from films allowed him to extend j.k. livin – which he founded in 2008 – into other avenues such as music and lifestyle. On 18 February 2009, Ron Spaulding, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Fontana, the independent distribution division of Universal Music Group, announced an exclusive deal with McConaughey for his indie record label, j.k. livin. ‘There is no question that Matthew McConaughey is one of today’s most popular personalities and successful entrepreneurs,’ Spaulding said. ‘He’s translated his simple, yet enthusiastic approach to life into his company j.k. livin and now his record label. We are thrilled to partner with him to bring j.k. livin’s music to not only his loyal fans worldwide, but to music lovers everywhere.’

McConaughey’s first signing was the reggae musician Mishka whom McConaughey first encountered randomly and then set about trying to track him down. He subsequently saw Mishka at the House of Blues on Sunset Blvd. His debut album Above the Bones was the first release from McConaughey’s label. The label’s biography read: ‘In 1993, Matthew McConaughey was filming Dazed and Confused, struggling with the passing of his father when he was overtaken by a saying that would soon change his life. That saying was “just keep livin” or “j.k. livin” as it’s now called. His father “Pop” is the man stencilled in the logo in remembrance of its origin. As life continued forward, he found that the j.k. livin approach to each day helped him navigate through the good times and bad, stay true to his ideals along the way and make the best out of this adventure we call life. j.k. livin is not a rulebook, it’s a lifestyle.’

That image of his father was the only image McConaughey had in mind for the brand’s logo. It is a silhouette of Pop, designed by one of McConaughey’s artist friends, in the last picture taken of him at Navarre Beach in Florida wearing his famed baby-blue shorts and hat.

McConaughey spoke about the success if the album Above the Bones and j.k.livin to Rebecca Murray of About.com: Hollywood Movies: ‘It held at number two on the reggae Billboard charts for seven weeks. We’re about to surpass the sales of the very first album that he had put out in a much shorter time. Mishka’s actually supposed to be here tonight. He played Surfrider Foundation yesterday. The brands on www.jklivinstore.com are selling great. We’re coming up with four new products this week. And the film production’s doing well. We’re just getting into TV. Sold two things to TV. We’re going have a couple of TV series’ that we’re working on.’

However, ties between Mishka and McConaughey would be quickly severed, as is often the case in the entertainment industry. ‘Initially, it was a big boost,’ Mishka said to Mike Voorheis of Star News in 2012. ‘I wasn’t signed to any label, and it was quite a struggle at the time. Matthew lost enthusiasm and got busy with other projects. You go so far and then they didn’t know what to do with me. That left me with my hands tied.’

McConaughey’s own choice in music reflects his passion for telling stories and travelling, absorbing new cultures and ways of life. He dug into the local Texan tales of country outlaw Willie Nelson, the inspired blues of African player Ali Farka Touré and the wisdom of Bob Marley. Those guys followed their own agenda, free of shackles and society’s conventions. They were akin to the intellectual Beatniks of 1950s and 1960s San Francisco, New York and Paris. McConaughey also likes the music of Americana-folk singer James McMurtry (son of author Larry McMurtry) and Dennis Brown.

‘It’s very similar to making movies. It’s very similar to telling a story,’ McConaughey said to MTV News about songs and the art of storytelling through different mediums whether it be music, movies or books. ‘That’s what’s really neat about it. Maybe it’s a different vocabulary, but each song’s its own story. Each song kind of has their own three-act structure… We start with a tease, then intro everybody, take it high, climax, pull off, give it a rest and then leave them wanting a little bit more.’

There has also been a philanthropic side to McConaughey. McConaughey has immersed himself in charity work over the years, juggling it both with family and acting. In February 2008 he ran the Nike + Human Race in Austin. The 10-km run took place on the same day in 25 cities around the world raising money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund and NineMillion.org.

There is a part of McConaughey that has always wanted to give back to society by helping those that have been less fortunate in life than he himself has been. McConaughey has had it fairly easy – after returning from Australia in 1988 as an exchange student he went to college, got into the movies, moved to LA and became rich and famous. Since A Time to Kill the decisions he has made have governed his choice of roles and the direction of his career. And now he is all about giving back to those who have been less fortunate.

The charity side of j.k. livin is ‘dedicated to helping teenage kids lead active lives and make healthy choices to become great men and women.’ It was reported that he had rescued various pets stranded after the flooding of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina in 2006. He once rescued a cat from two youths who doused the animal in hairspray and were attempting to set fire to it in Sherman Oaks. He is a person who cares about humanity and animals.

j.k. livin is both a brand and a philosophy, and McConaughey is both something of a shaman and a salesman. ‘We can talk about j.k. livin a lot of different ways,’ McConaughey explained to Texas Monthly’s John Spong in 2008. ‘It’s a decision-making paradigm, not a rulebook. It has structure, but it doesn’t put life in a box. It’s not all aphorisms. You take your own counsel with yourself on what it is. It’s a lyric, a philosophy, a bumper sticker. It’s a rap, a rhythm, a bass line. It’s not about treble, ’cause we got a lot of that out there. Let’s keep to our bass line.’

Though he had endeavours outside of acting, he had already moved on to his next project – yet another rom-com. The paychecks were simply too good to turn down and he enjoyed making them.

‘As you know, a script with a $100,000 offer isn’t near as funny as the exact same script with a $10- or $15-million offer,’ McConaughey admitted to John Powers of Vogue. ‘The same words – they’re just funnier.’

‘The industry put him in a slot,’ said director Richard Linklater, who’d cast McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, to Holly Milea of Elle. ‘It’s not like he was turning down great parts. The material wasn’t coming his way. He was a character actor in a leading man’s body. Then something changed.’

There had been rumours circulating in Hollywood that McConaughey was going to be cast in a big screen adaption of the cult 1980s detective series, Magnum P.I., which starred Tom Selleck in the lead role as a private investigator living in Oahu, Hawaii. The show ran from 1980 to 1989 and was one of the most popular TV series of the decade. McConaughey reportedly turned down the $15 million pay cheque in order to reinvent himself after his final rom-com.

McConaughey spoke to Pop Matters’ Cynthia Fuchs about how at ease he has become with himself in front of the camera: ‘I can handle going to see dailies now, I can objectively see myself without being vain. I can see and tell the truth about the character and see what’s working for me, and if what I’ve got is what I was trying to do. I can find something I like or dislike, and be constructively critical of my work now, and I couldn’t before. I love the process, I love the making of them. But if I see a movie of mine on TV, I just keep flipping.’

*****

The phone rang. Time for another rom-com. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was released in the UK and US in May 2009. McConaughey was still stuck in the role of rom-com actor after The Wedding Planner, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch and Fool’s Gold and now he was cast in the risible Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. ‘I was good to them and they were good to me,’ McConaughey told the Scotsman on his experience of making romantic comedies. ‘Shoot, yeah. Some of those romantic comedies, they put food on my kids’ table. Trust me. Absolutely. And they’re quite fun to do. You’ve got to be in a whole different mind-frame for them.’

Loosely based on Charles Dickens’ seminal supernatural tale, A Christmas Carol, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is passable if only for it’s interesting premise. While the Dickens novel features Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the film is set the day before and during a wedding day. McConaughey plays a successful and famous photographer and womaniser named Connor Mead who is haunted by his ex-girlfriends at his younger brother’s wedding. Directed by Mark Waters, the film also stars Jennifer Garner, Lacey Chabert and Michael Douglas. Filming took place between February and July of 2008 in Massachusetts.

McConaughey was asked by a fan in People magazine what he’d do if he was visited by his former girlfriends. He replied: ‘I think I’d learn that the reason that they dug me when we were dating was how excited I would get about details of little situations, like making pancakes in the morning. And I think the other thing would probably be my sense of humour. I’m actually happy to say I’ve been in some of my ex-girlfriends’ weddings. I go, “Well, right on, man. That’s good.”’

McConaughey loved the script, especially the first twenty or thirty pages where he thought there was a lot of bite to the story. It was the clever dialogue that grabbed him and the strong male character was someone he saw himself portraying onscreen. ‘It was just the best romantic comedy I’ve read in years,’ McConaughey enthused to People’s Brenda Rodriguez. ‘It had a big heart about having a second chance. And the ghosts in it levitated the comedy and allowed me to just be a fool.’

Michael Douglas’s character Uncle Wayne was laugh-a-minute too; McConaughey thought the rich comedy dialogue was on par with The Wedding Crashers. Usually in romantic comedies the dialogue doesn’t cut deep with the audience, but McConaughey felt differently about this film. The ghosts gave the script added humour. It’s a fairy tale but with humour and warmth and it offered something different to the previous rom-coms McConaughey had been cast in.

Garner enjoyed working with her male co-star. She thought McConaughey was a sweet, gentle and funny guy who was very easy to get along with. Garner admired him as an actor and was more than elated to be working with him. Garner liked the film because it was a different variation on the clichéd romantic-comedy, not just because of the ghosts, but because of her character. She’s never had a problem resisting someone in her life who has tried to break her heart and nor has she ever gone for ‘the bad guy.’ What she liked about her character was that her dialogue reminded her of the many conversations she’d had about romance with her girlfriends.

McConaughey wasn’t about to change things in his life abruptly, the way his character does, as he told journalist Rebecca Murray at About.com: Hollywood Movies at the US premiere of the film: ‘I’m not a big sort of signpost guy with things like that. I’m about to turn forty; I don’t really see that as like a, “Oh my god, I’ve got to do this.” No, I kind of roll with it a little bit more. We’ll work hard at it. I’ve still got a lot of relationships and doing the same things that I have been working on for thirty-nine years, so that feels good – whether it’s family or friends or job – to feel it all still connected from thirty-nine years ago, things that I started twenty years ago, friends that I met twenty-five years ago that are still here tonight. Things like that.’

To work with a revered acting icon as Michael Douglas was a major coup for McConaughey who had yet to enter the prime of his career (though no one knew it at the time). He learned a lot from Douglas just from sitting down chatting to him. Douglas spoke to him about the experiences he had on some of his own movies such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Wall Street. It was a dream for McConaughey to gain so much knowledge about the making of movies, the industry and what to do and what not to do in films.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past debuted at the US box office at number two and though it was not a critical success it fared well.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote: ‘It’s not a bad idea and Michael Douglas gives a game cameo as the spirit of a louche uncle who taught the teenage McConaughey all the moves. (If you want to see this idea done properly and funnily, incidentally, rent Dylan Kidd’s Roger Dodger on DVD.) How crass and joyless the whole business is, culminating in a love-declaration scene prefigured by McConaughey knocking an elderly man unconscious, to get the boring, obstructive old dude out of the way. Yikes.’

Tim Robey wrote in The Daily Telegraph: ‘Still, there’s an undertone of satisfying bitterness before the gloop sets in: the recriminations are just an ounce more cutting and tart than you’re ready for. McConaughey, who will be just as funny as Douglas in 20 years’ time, looks suitably chastened. There’s only one scene with his shirt off.’

Empire’s Anna Smith wrote: ‘The teen scenes have appeal, offset by Douglas’ enjoyable rotter, but McConaughey, all charmless sleaze and corny chat-up lines, is neither funny nor ripe for redemption.’

Thankfully, that was it for McConaughey and rom-coms. He’d had enough and there’s certainly an argument that film fans had had quite enough of seeing him in those types of films, too. ‘What’s tougher about a romantic comedy is that it’s a whole different game,’ McConaughey explained to Vulture’s Jennifer Vineyard. ‘They’re not supposed to have a super-clear definition. You have to float through those. [Makes a waving motion with his arms.] There’s an amiability and a buoyancy, and you got to keep it afloat. And definition will go down, and if you go down in a rom-com, you sink the ship. It’s dead. Over. Twelve minutes into the film, you’re done.’

Matthew loves acting. He’s one of few people who can actually say, ‘I love my job.’ He likes it more now than he used to and he knows how to handle the fame and the rigours that come with acting – being away from home, the travel, long hours, promotional work and such. But he was beginning to feel an itch that needed to be scratched. Change can be a good thing as he would soon learn more than ever before.

It was announced in June 2010 that McConaughey was teaming up with Marc Hyman to write a scripted comedy for FX, the popular TV channel, based on material by J.R. Reed. He also made an appearance in the critically acclaimed HBO Will Ferrell-produced comedy series Eastbound & Down. McConaughey plays Texan scout Roy McDaniel in three episodes in seasons two and three. Somewhere on the backburner was an idea for a biopic of Billy Carter, the brother of President Jimmy Carter, which he’d been discussing with Dazed and Confused director Richard Linklater.

The Guardian’s Andrew Pulver noted: ‘He could have been the new Brad Pitt, a stand-by of the Oscar nomination sheet; instead he became the young George Hamilton.’

McConaughey’s career has evolved which has helped him as a person and as an actor as he explained to Chud’s Devin Faraci in 2006: ‘The interesting thing about my career is that I went in reverse – I had a very successful film that made me famous right off the bat, A Time to Kill. And then later started to learn what the heck I was doing, started to work on my craft and take classes, which is what I’m doing now. I didn’t have any of that experience before. Did I expect to be doing that? Sure. Did I expect this is how it would work out? No.’

Films that have been openly discussed but failed to find a backer are Hammer Down and Dear Delilah and Tishomingo Blues (based on the Elmore Leonard novel, with Don Cheadle initially attached as director). Such is the nature of Hollywood. McConaughey moved on to new projects and even expressed interest in directing a feature, but he knows what his first professional love is as he told Empire: ‘I’ve gotta say to you, I’m really enjoying acting, I just feel like I’m learning so much, and kind of enjoying the wonderful mystery of acting and storytelling. I’m doing my work, learning my rules early then just throwing them out the back door when it’s time to work and let it fly.’

However, despite his obvious passion and the commercial success of some of his mainstream films, McConaughey was dangerously close to becoming just another piece of disposable Hollywood fodder; a caricature of himself, taking whatever roles came his way just for the pay cheque. In a similar fashion to British actor Hugh Grant, who has carved out a career for himself as a bumbling upper middle class English gent, McConaughey was shifting between flimsy roles in romantic comedies to hardly taxing parts in mostly unmemorable dramas. Bar the odd exception such as Frailty, his films were memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Be that as it may, McConaughey soon surprised everyone.