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10 years ago, Matthew McConaughey was in a rut. After starring in a string of romantic comedies like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch and Fool’s Gold, he became typecast as a romantic lead with an easygoing vibe, a care-free demeanor and a relaxed persona. This was kind of a step back in his career. After all, before the 2000s he had been eclectic enough to stand out in films like 1997’s Contact and the Steven Spielberg historical drama Amistad, not to mention his breakout role in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, which basically associated him with the catchphrase “alright, alright, alright” for eternity.
Not that being a romantic comedy icon is a bad thing – after all, actors like Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant have built very successful careers by being great at romcoms. Also, we can’t blame an actor for finding a comfort zone in a highly competitive industry: we’ve all got bills to pay, and Zooey Deschanel, Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise and Michael Cera (just to name a few) have played the same characters for years and we don’t respect them any less for it.
What separated McConaughey from a typical romcom leading man, however, was not only that we’d already seen him do more challenging roles, but also that he had reached a mega sex symbol status that, as we all know, is fleeting. Hollywood is always on the lookout for the next silver screen eye-candy, and while the industry generally allows male actors to ride that wave longer than their female counterparts, McConaughey had to reinvent himself sooner or later if he wanted to continue getting work. As he mentioned in this Deadline interview, he knew that typecasting could be problematic, and that a career U-turn, as necessary as it was, would not come free of charge: "I knew work was going to dry up for a while. (...) In those two years that I took off, I didn't re-brand. I un-branded."
By those two years he’s referring to the period between 2009 and 2011, during which he decided to stop saying yes to romantic comedies (the last one being the poorly received Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, in which he starred opposite Jennifer Garner) and started to go after meatier roles. It probably wasn’t an easy decision, but it marked the beginning of a career resurgence that has since been dubbed “The McConaissance” – and it all started with the 2011 courtroom drama The Lincoln Lawyer.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see how The Lincoln Lawyer parallels McConaughey’s career transformation. He plays Mick Haller, a defense attorney who, much like McConaughey, knows he’s good at his job but is comfortable taking easy gigs. Mick operates as a morally flexible lawyer who wouldn’t be out of place on Better Call Saul, forming ties with criminals, giving legal advice to sex workers, and making borderline illegal deals with paparazzi, all while working from his “office”: the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, which sports the not-too-subtle license plate NTGUILTY. Like McConaughey himself, Mick found a comfort zone and had fun with it for a long while.
Everything changes for Mick when he is handpicked to take on the case of playboy Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillipe), the son of real estate mogul Mary Windsor (Frances Fisher), who is charged with assaulting a woman inside her home. The deeper Mick gets into the details of the case, the more he realizes he’ll have to work hard to get Louis acquitted, and that a win will come at great personal cost. McConaughey’s Mick is fun to watch, and you can’t help but root for him once you realize that he’s basically a good guy in way over his head, especially after some plot twists that almost literally leave him staring down the barrel of a gun.
Back in real life, this movie took everyone by surprise, since we thought the actor wouldn’t take on a serious role anytime soon, much less one that’s cynical and at times scary. What McConaughey’s performance stated in The Lincoln Lawyer was that he wasn’t just good – he was great. There aren’t many actors who can pull off the type of role that starts out comical but then gets serious as the story progresses, to the point where we end up fearing for his life, and the actor we’d been taking for granted made it seem effortless.
His compelling performance in The Lincoln Lawyer signaled to producers everywhere that the dull guy from romcoms was gone, and he was replaced by a new guy who could take on all kinds of challenges. As McConaughey himself stated, before The Lincoln Lawyer he faced two years of not booking any projects because no one took him seriously enough to cast him in thrillers and dramas. After this film, however, Hollywood quickly picked up the pace and let the actor try his hand at basically whatever he wanted. And luckily for everyone, he did just that.
In the William Friedkin thriller Killer Joe, for example, he played a sadistic hitman who made sure we’d never see fried chicken the same way again and left audiences asking, “Wait, are we scared of Matthew McConaughey now? Is that even possible?” But then came Mud, in which he played a loner with a troubled past who was surprisingly romantic in his own way. His performance was highlighted by a Palm d’Or nomination at Cannes. By the time he won an Academy Award for his performance as Ron Woodroof in Jean-Marc Vallée’s independent drama Dallas Buyers Club, we knew his emergence as a serious dramatic actor wasn’t a fluke. The McConaissance was real.
Ten years after The Lincoln Lawyer, a great performance by McConaughey is practically a given (which still feels kind of surprising to say). When a dud like The Dark Tower comes along, whose problems are far bigger than McConaughey’s performance as the villainous Man in Black, we balk at how the movie in question managed to waste his talent.
Between interesting choices like playing detective Rustin Cohle in the gritty HBO series True Detective and becoming a car commercial meme, McConaughey has made the McConaissance a force to be reckoned with, and one that has been paying off big for audiences as well. We still don’t have much news about his next big project (unless you count 2021’s Sing 2), which looks to be a reprisal of one of his early roles in Joel Schumacher’s A Time to Kill. But whether it is this miniseries, another movie, or something else entirely, we’ll be there to keep witnessing the McConaissance in motion.