Hollywood’s shining stars don’t always get the roles they want. Matthew McConaughey (Texas, USA, 54 years old) is an example of this, and this was corroborated during an interview for the American magazine Interviewpublished on June 10, and in which he talks with one of his most special colleagues, producer and writer Glen Powell. The Oscar winner for playing an AIDS patient in Dallas Buyers Club (2013) has revealed that he had to pause his career for two years because he felt stuck in the same type of role. McConaughey gained enormous popularity in the 1990s for his work in romantic comedies. Some especially renowned: How to lose a guy in 10 days either Wedding plans. “Usually, he did zig Zag when I felt like Hollywood wanted me to do zag. When I had my years in romantic comedies, there was a limit to the bandwidth I could give them, and those were some solid hits for me,” she reveals during the conversation with Powell, also a hot actor for his role in Anyone but you (2023).
“I wanted to try new things,” he says of the reasons that led him to leave Hollywood for a time. Although for him it was a path of thorns in which she came to feel “terror”. “I had long conversations with my wife [Camila Alves McConaughey] about the need to find a new vocation,” says the actor who at that time doubted whether to continue being one. The interpreter also remembers in the interview having felt disenchanted, so he seriously considered leaving acting and moving into the world of education by teaching at an institute, studying direction or even being a nature guide. “I honestly thought, ‘I left Hollywood. I got out of my lane. The lane that Hollywood told me I had to stay in.’ And Hollywood said, ‘Well, fuck you, buddy. “You should have stayed in your lane.”
“I thought? Three days ago I would have played any of these roles! And now you ask me which one I want to do?’ It was something tremendously shocking. “I put on a backpack and went to Peru for three weeks just so I could hear myself think,” she recalls of a time when she had enormous popularity and reputation in the film mecca. “I’ve had a lot of moments in my career where I think, ‘I don’t know what I want to do, I just know I don’t want to do that.’”
“It was terrifying. The days are long, the feeling of insignificance.” After two years of retirement, he returned to the most important film studios in the world to continue working in roles that catapulted him even higher, such as Interstellar or the television series True Detective, both released in 2014. “But I decided that was what I had to do, so I wasn’t going to pull the parachute and abandon the mission I was on. But he was scary, because I didn’t know if he was ever going to do it. Get out of the desert.”
Matthew McConaughey rose to fame in 1993 thanks to his starring role in Move of ’76, just before being crowned one of the kings of romantic comedies in the early 2000s, sharing the spotlight in films with Kate Hudson and Jennifer Lopez. The now film producer has not specified when he paused his career, although he is not credited with any roles from 2007 to 2010. In 2013, he starred in films such as The wolf of Wall Street and Dallas Buyers Clubfor which he won his first and only Oscar in 2014.
That Glen Powell was in charge of interviewing him is no coincidence. In May, during an article for the American magazine The Hollywood Reporter, the actor, 35 years old and also Texan, confessed that the two had a more than professional relationship. Thanks to him, she decided to permanently leave Los Angeles for Austin, Texas. “He told me, ‘Hollywood is the Matrix, man. You connect and everything is a fake world. Then I went to Austin and disconnected. Everything is real. “Those are my friends, my family, my actions matter there,” Powell recalled of that talk. McConaughey moved to Texas in 2014 with his wife, now 41, and his sons Levi, 15, Livingston, 11, and his daughter Vida, 14.
The actor’s time away from the spotlight was especially turbulent in his life, as it included a run for governor of Texas that almost became a reality. In addition, the interpreter has served as a “visiting instructor” at the University of Austin, where he is part of the faculty of the Radio, Television and Film department, and as the British tabloid Daily Mail confirms, he is the school’s self-proclaimed “minister of culture.” In an interview for EL PAÍS in 2021, McConaughey talked about the three things he needs every day: someone to admire, someone to wait for and someone to follow. In his memoir published that year, the actor himself coined a word for his sabbatical and his rebirth: he called it McCoinassance.
