6) Matthew McConaughey – Dazed and Confused
Matthew McConaughey is a relative of Houdini. This is completely made up and unverifiable of course, but there has to be something in the man’s ancestry that can explain the way in which he escaped the apparently locked solid chains of laid-back, good-looking, romantic comedy prison.
But then, if we look back at his first proper movie role, his career wasn’t always destined to go the shiny, superficial way that it did for so long.
Dazed and Confused, which follows various groups of teenagers through their final day at school in the summer of 1976, has become something of a cult coming-of-age comedy, and also opened the door to a few other names besides McConaughey who would go on to have decent careers – Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg (who if nothing else will forever be loved as Joey’s one-time psychotic fruit-drying, fish-pocketing roommate Eddie in Friends) and Ben Affleck are the most notable here.
McConaughey doesn’t actually play one of the teenagers, but a guy in his early twenties – David Wooderson – who basically just hasn’t learned to let go yet. Or, to put it more bluntly, hangs about in decidedly creepy fashion waiting for unsuspecting high school girls to cross his path (see many, many spoofs of these moments).
There is a lot of what we would later see from McConaughey in David; he is laid-back to the point of barely conscious, the matching trade-mark drawl is instantly recognizable, and he plays a character whose precise role is to not do very much. But despite the fact that playing David just required this sort of ease, McConaughey does have a certain on-screen presence in Dazed and Confused that lingers where some of the other actors’ didn’t. Perhaps it was because he was playing an older character, or perhaps it was because he really had something that he could have built on….
Anyway, whatever it was doesn’t matter because McConaughey himself clearly didn’t see it, and after a brief foray through The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (along with Renee Zellweger) and a perilously close call in with creditable success during 1997 with both Spielberg’s Amistad and Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (seriously – if ever there had been a large, flashing neon sign pointing towards the land of “DO PROPER DRAMA” hanging right in the face of an actor, it was there in front of McConaughey during that year), come the 2000’s McConaughey fell (quite literally) for the fool’s gold of romantic comedy.
Here he proceeded to melt the hearts of women – and the brains of most movie watchers- with productions such as The Wedding Planner (along with Jennifer Lopez), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (opposite Kate Hudson), Failure to Launch (with Sarah Jessica Parker and Bradley Cooper) and Fool’s Gold (again with Kate Hudson). Although none of these films were absolutely terrible (although I am being absolutely generous here), McConaughey himself finally realized that his own lifestyle of “running around a beach with his shirt off” had typecast him as the sort of actor that he really didn’t need to be.
Now comes the moment of escape. All of a sudden, McConaughey dug deep, and found the side of him that ironically wasn’t dazed and confused. This produced The Lincoln Lawyer (2011), Mud (2012) and ultimately, in 2013, Dallas Buyers Club, in which he played the real life Ron Woodroof, an AIDS victim who determinedly smuggled much needed drug treatments into 1980s Texas for himself and fellow sufferers, at a time at which AIDS was still highly stigmatized.
Gaunt, grim and for the most part obnoxious and hostile, McConaughey is unrecognizable in the role. But he carried the film unfailingly, and was finally rewarded with the Academy Award for Best Actor in a year in which there was some strong contention (including of course the ubiquitous Leonardo DiCaprio) and another nomination of his own – for best actor in a supporting role for Wolf of Wall Street.
His next project – Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar – is all set to continue to rocket this acting credibility that McConaughey has resurrected after it flickered briefly in Dazed and Confused before dying a horrible death. He is a perfect example of someone who started somewhere innocuous, made a few mistakes along the way, and eventually came into his own.