Rom-Coms Made Matthew McConaughey Take A Break From Hollywood

In the 2000s, McConaughey was on a rom-com roll. There was The Wedding Planner with Jennifer Lopez in 2001. How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days with Kate Hudson in 2003. Failure to Launch with Sarah Jessica Parker in 2006. And Ghosts of Girlfriends Past with Jennifer Garner in 2009. 

No wonder the guy had chapped lips. But at some point, enough is enough. “I’ve usually zigged when I felt like Hollywood wanted me to zag,” Matthew McConaughey told Glen Powell in a recent conversation for Interview. “I wanted to try some other stuff.”

The problem was, Hollywood wanted him to keep smooching starlets. There are worse dilemmas. But McConaughey wasn’t getting roles outside of Handsome Rascal Who Needs the Love of A Good Woman and eventually, he surrendered. The only solution he could see was “to leave Hollywood for two years.”

“Dude, it was scary,” he confessed to Powell. “I had long talks with my wife about needing to find a new vocation. I think I’m going to teach high school classes. I think I’m going to study to be a conductor. I think I’m going to go be a wildlife guide. I honestly thought, ‘I stepped out of Hollywood. I got out of my lane.’ The lane Hollywood said I should stay in, and Hollywood’s like, ‘Well, fuck you, dude. You should have stayed in your lane. Later.’”

“I wasn’t going to pull the parachute and quit the mission I was on,” he said. “But it was scary because I didn’t know if I was ever going to get out of the desert.”

Powell agreed that it was a risky move, noting he knew plenty of stories about “people who stepped out of Hollywood and then all of a sudden the train left and it never came back.”

Somehow, it came back for McConaughey, who returned to win an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. A check of his recent IMDb confirms that somehow he left the Kate Hudsons of the world behind. He offers no real explanation about how he made the shift, other than taking a break from the roles that pigeonholed him.

Just in case you think McConaughey is getting too precious about his artistic ambitions, it sounds like he’s okay with some of his pop-culture baggage. “I never became cynical about playing my greatest hits,” he laughed. “People go, ‘Alright, alright, alright.’ Then, ‘I suppose you hate that.’

“I’m like, ‘No, I know the author.’”