In this article, we are going to thoroughly explore the topic of Matthew McConaughey and all aspects related to it. From its origin to its impact on current society, through its evolution over time and its influence on different fields of study. Matthew McConaughey is a topic of great importance both historically and in the current context, and it is essential to understand it to have a complete vision of its relevance in today's world. Through this article, we are going to analyze in depth each aspect of Matthew McConaughey and provide a detailed overview that helps us understand its role and meaning today.
American actor (born 1969)
"McConaughey" redirects here. Not to be confused with McConnaughey.
Matthew David McConaughey (/məˈkɒnəheɪ/mə-KON-ə-hay; born November 4, 1969) is an American actor. He achieved his breakthrough with a supporting performance in the coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confused (1993). After a number of supporting roles, his first success as a leading man came in the legal drama A Time to Kill (1996). His career progressed with lead roles in the science fiction film Contact (1997), the historical drama Amistad (1997), and the war film U-571 (2000).
Matthew David McConaughey was born on November 4, 1969 in Uvalde, Texas. He has Irish heritage, particularly from the County Cavan/County Monaghan area. His mother, Mary Kathleen (née McCabe), a published author and a former kindergarten teacher, was from Trenton, New Jersey. His father, James Donald McConaughey, also had Irish roots. He was born in Mississippi in 1929 and raised in Louisiana where he ran an oil pipe supply business; he played for the Kentucky Wildcats and the Houston Cougars college football teams. Jim was selected by the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League (NFL) in the 27th round of the 1953 NFL draft. He was released before the season began and never played an official league game in the NFL. McConaughey's parents married each other three times, having divorced each other twice. He has two older brothers, Michael and Patrick (who was adopted). Michael, nicknamed "Rooster", is a millionaire who starred in the CNBC docu-series West Texas Investors Club. The family were Methodists.
His original plan changed as he had wanted to attend Southern Methodist University until one of his brothers told him that private-school tuition would have been a burden on the family's finances. He had planned to attend law school after graduation from college but discovered he did not have any interest in becoming a lawyer.
Career
Early 1990s–2000: Breakthrough and rise to prominence
In the early 1990s. McConaughey began working in television commercials.
Bob Balaban's My Boyfriend's Back premiered on August 6, 1993, where McConaughey made his first big screen appearance as ''Guy 2''. On September 24, Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused premiered. McConaughey played Wooderson in a large ensemble cast of actors who would later become stars. He was not originally cast in the film, as the role of Wooderson was originally small and meant to be cast locally for budget purposes. At the time of casting, he was a film student at the University of Texas in Austin and went out with his girlfriend to the Hyatt hotel bar. He approached casting director Don Phillips. Phillips recalls, "The bartender says to him, 'See that guy down there? That's Don Phillips. He cast Sean Penn in Fast Times.' And Matthew goes, 'I'm gonna go down and talk to this guy.'" Phillips also recalls that Linklater didn't like McConaughey at first "because he was too handsome". During production, another character named Pickford was meant to be a larger role. Due to the behavior of the actor playing Pickford with other cast members, his screen time was cut in favor of McConaughey's character, Wooderson. Linklater recalled "There was another actor who was kind of the opposite . He wasn't really getting along with everybody. I could tell the actors weren't responding to him." Much of the Wooderson role was improvised or written on the spot.Dazed and Confused was released on September 24, 1993, in 183 theaters, grossing $918,127 on its opening weekend. It went on to make $7.9 million in North America. The film received positive reviews from critics. The film generally gets favorable reviews. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 92% approval rating. The website's critical consensus reads: "Featuring an excellent ensemble cast, a precise feel for the 1970s, and a killer soundtrack, Dazed and Confused is a funny, affectionate, and clear-eyed look at high school life." In her review for The Austin Chronicle, Marjorie Baumgarten gave particular praise to Matthew McConaughey's performance: "He is a character we're all too familiar with in the movies, but McConaughey nails this guy without a hint of condescension or whimsy, claiming this character for all time as his own".
The Newton Boys, co-written and directed by Richard Linklater, was released in 1998. It is based on the true story of the Newton Gang, a family of bank robbers from Uvalde, Texas. In 1999, McConaughey acted in EDtv. Directed by Ron Howard, its an adaptation of the Quebecois film Louis 19, King of the Airwaves (Louis 19, le roi des ondes) (1994), The film was a box office bomb, grossing only $35.2 million from an $80 million production budget. In 2000, he starred in U-571, a submarine film directed by Jonathan Mostow.
2001–2011: Romantic comedies and professional expansion
McConaughey recognized that his "lifestyle, living on the beach, running with my shirt off, doing romantic comedies" had caused him to be typecast for certain roles, and he sought dramatic work with other themes. This shift in his choice of roles has been known as the "McConaissance" between 2011 and 2014. He said:
I got to feeling like, for a few years, I was doing something that I liked to do with romantic and action comedies. But believe me, I noticed there were other things that were not coming in. And if they were coming in, it was in an independent form with a much smaller paycheck, and nobody really wanting to get behind them ... But I knew I could say no to the things I'd been doing. In saying no to those things, I knew work was going to dry up for awhile ... Year and a half, still nothing. At two years, all of a sudden, in my opinion, I became a new good idea for some good directors.
2011–2014: Established actor
In 2012, McConaughey starred alongside Channing Tatum in Magic Mike, based on Tatum's early life; it was directed by Steven Soderbergh. Also in 2012 came Mud, which gained him praise for his role as a fugitive.
In April 2014, Time magazine included McConaughey in its annual Time 100 as one of the "Most Influential People in the World". In August 2014, the Lincoln Motor Company signed a multi-year collaboration with McConaughey for an ad campaign. The commercials, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive), featured McConaughey as a storyteller driving a Lincoln's MKC crossover. Shortly after the commercials debuted in September 2014, they were parodied by Ellen DeGeneres, Conan O'Brien, Jim Carrey, South Park, and Saturday Night Live. Overall sales for Lincoln increased by 25 percent one month after the ads debuted. The series of commercials starring McConaughey continued for several more years; during this period he also endorsed the MKZ sedan, MKX and Nautilus crossovers and Aviator SUV.
The same year, McConaughey received critical acclaim for playing Cooper, a widowed father and astronaut in Christopher Nolan's epic science fiction film Interstellar (2014).
McConaughey starred as Walter Padick in the 2017 Stephen King adaptation The Dark Tower, which received negative reactions from most critics. In 2018, he starred in the true life gangster drama White Boy Rick, which gained mixed reviews. In 2019, he headlined the erotic thriller Serenity, that also starred Diane Lane and Anne Hathaway. The film was panned by both critics and audiences after its release on January 25. McConaughey next had the starring role in Harmony Korine's The Beach Bum, a comedy also featuring Zac Efron and Jonah Hill. The film was released on March 29, 2019. In late 2019 McConaughey appeared in the Guy Ritchie film The Gentlemen, playing fictional cannabis baron Mickey Pearson.
In 2020 McConaughey published a memoir, Greenlights. On February 6, 2023, it was announced that he voiced an animated version of Elvis Presley on the Netflix animated series Agent Elvis, released on March 17, 2023. Following the announced departure on May 8, 2023, of Kevin Costner from the Yellowstone series at the end of Part 2 of Season 5, the original series is to end and be followed by a series related to Yellowstone and featuring McConaughey in a new title role.
Personal life
McConaughey met Camila Alves in 2006. He and Alves became engaged on December 25, 2011, and were married in a private Catholic ceremony on June 9, 2012, in Austin where they reside. Together, they have three children.
A Christian, McConaughey often speaks publicly about his faith. He attends a non-denominational church. He has stated that he has received private personal criticism and judgment for his beliefs from some members of Hollywood:
I have had – and I won't throw any people under the bus – but I have had moments where I was on stage receiving an award in front of my peers in Hollywood, and there were people in the crowd that I have prayed with before dinners many times, and when I thanked God, I saw some of those people go to clap, but then notice that, "bad thing on my resume" and then sit back on their hands.
In 2023, McConaughey stated that he and longtime friend Woody Harrelson could potentially be brothers. His mother claimed to have been intimate with Harrelson's father, Charles Harrelson, around the time of McConaughey's conception.
In September 2023, Madame Tussauds New York unveiled a new wax figure of Matthew McConaughey, inspired by his 2021 appearance on The Tonight Show. The event, featured during McConaughey's visit to The View, to promote his children's book, Just Because.
Politics
In a November 2020 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, McConaughey denied he was interested in running for governor.The Texas Tribune reported on McConaughey's lack of involvement in politics, saying that he had not voted in a primary race since "at least" 2012 and had never donated to a political campaign at the state or federal level up through 2021. He had voted in the 2018 Texas elections and the 2020 United States elections.
In March 2021, McConaughey confirmed that he was considering running in the 2022 Texas gubernatorial election. In an October 2021 Twitter Spaces interview with NPR, McConaughey was asked if he was going to run for governor of Texas. He replied, "I am not – until I am." When asked questions about political issues, such as voting rights and abortion, McConaughey opted to remain "purposely vague", and he did not disclose his political party. Just over two weeks before the Texas primary candidate filing deadline, McConaughey released a video on his official Twitter profile stating that he would not be competing for the office.
In June 2022, McConaughey joined the White House press briefing and advocated for "commonsense gun laws" during a 20-minute speech, in which he spoke about the Robb Elementary School shooting, which occurred in his hometown of Uvalde. He said, "We need responsible gun ownership. We need background checks. We need to raise the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 rifle to 21. We need a waiting period for those rifles. We need red flag laws and consequences for those who abuse them."CNN described the speech as "impassioned and at-times emotional".
Philanthropy
McConaughey started the "just keep livin foundation", which is "dedicated to helping teenage kids lead active lives and make healthy choices to become great men and women". On February 25, 2016, McConaughey received the Creative Conscience award from unite4:humanity for his work with his foundation.
In 2019 McConaughey officially became a professor of practice for the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the Moody College of Communication at his alma mater, UT-Austin; he had served as a visiting instructor since 2015. The first two sessions were about the filming of the movie Free State of Jones.
^Pallardy, Richard (February 18, 2014). "Biography, Movies, & Facts". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved April 8, 2024.
^ ab"Matthew McConaughey hopes to send his kids to the Gaeltacht". IrishCentral. June 21, 2017. Archived from the original on September 29, 2016. his children to be immersed in the culture and craic of Ireland and that he hopes that he too can learn a cupla focail (a little Irish) along the way. "I gotta keep up the Gaelic. I want them reading the literature. I want Riverdancing. I want them saying 'grand' and 'lunatic" to the marvelous," said McConaughey. "When they're older, I want to send them to that Irish language summer camp you guys do. It's like a rite of passage for you guys, isn't it? When you're teenagers. I want them fluent – which means I gotta do a crash course too."
^ abcCohen, Jason (August 1996). "His Time to Kill". Texas Monthly. Archived from the original on October 29, 2018. Retrieved October 28, 2014. Big Jim ran a Texaco station in Uvalde, but in 1980 – boom time – he moved the family to Longview and went into the pipe business. McConaughey's mother, Kay, was a Trenton, New Jersey-born schoolteacher, and in the course of 39 years she and Big Jim were twice divorced and twice remarried (Big Jim died in 1992). Nevertheless, it was a fairly religious, no-nonsense family with a few simple rules: no lying, no back talk, and, McConaughey remembers, "You could never say 'I can't.'"
^Schruers, Fred (August 22, 1996). "Hot Actor: Matthew McConaughey". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on February 3, 2015. Retrieved June 16, 2018. Jim McConaughey was born in Mississippi in 1929 and raised in Morgan City, La., and was 6 feet 2 inches and 220 pounds when he started playing defensive end for college coaching legend Bear Bryant (with whom he shared a nickname) at the University of Kentucky. He moved on before Bear did and played his last two years at the University of Houston, winning a watch as the conference's most improved player before being drafted by the Green Bay Packers in 1953. Before long, though, he was back in Texas with his bride, Kay, ending up in Uvalde (population today: 15,000). "Matthew was an accident," insists Rooster.
^Barnes, Denice (March 4, 2014). "Oscar winner's Aussie affair". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on March 13, 2017. Retrieved April 14, 2021.
^"A Time to Kill". Box Office Mojo. Archived from the original on April 2, 2019. Retrieved October 25, 2020.
^"MTV Movie awards". Statesman Journal: 32. June 12, 1997. Archived from the original on December 1, 2020. Retrieved October 25, 2020 – via Newspapers.
^"AFI|Catalog". catalog.afi.com. Archived from the original on February 6, 2021. Retrieved October 25, 2020.
^"Kevin Costner Is Leaving Yellowstone After Season Five". By Josh Rosenberg. Esquire magazine. May 8, 2023. Archived May 5, 2023, at the Wayback Machine