Matthew McConaughey recently told Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios on the latter’s “Good Trouble” podcast that he abandoned Hollywood and moved his family to Texas when the industry refused to let him branch out of romantic comedies. The Oscar winner was a titan of the genre at the time, with films like “The Wedding Planner,” “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” “Failure To Launch,” “Fool’s Gold” and “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” all surpassing or coming close to the $100 million mark at the worldwide box office.
“Look, man, the devil’s in the infinite yeses, not the nos,” McConaughey explained. “‘No’ is just as important, if not more important. Especially if you have some level of success and access. ‘No’ becomes more important than ‘yes.’ Because, I mean, we can all look around and see we’ve over-leveraged our life with yeses and going, ‘Geez, oh man. I’m making C-minuses and all this shit in my life because I said yes to too many things.'”
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“When I was rolling with the rom-coms, and I was the ‘rom-com dude,’ that was my lane and I liked that lane. That lane paid well, and it was working,” he continued. “I was so strong in that lane that anything outside that lane – dramas and stuff that I want[ed] to do – were like, ‘No, no, no. No, McConaughey.’ Hollywood said, ’No, no, no. You should stay there.’ So, since I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, I stopped doing what I was doing, and I moved down to the ranch in Texas.”
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After McConaughey relocated with his family to Texas, he made a pact with his wife and said: “I’m not going back to work unless I get offered roles I want to do.” And those roles were not rom-coms.
McConaughey told Glen Powell in an Interview magazine discussion over the summer that “it was scary” to leave Hollywood while his career was successful. He even thought that moving to Texas would mean he would need to find a new job.
“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,” the actor said. “I stepped out of Hollywood. I got out of my lane. The lane Hollywood said I should stay in, and [I thought] Hollywood [would say], ‘Well, fuck you, dude. You should have stayed in your lane’ It was scary. The days are long — the sense of insignificance. But I made up my mind that that’s what I needed to do, so I wasn’t going to pull the parachute and quit the mission I was on. But it was scary, because I didn’t know if I was ever going to get out of the desert.”
Hollywood certainly tried to lure McConaughey back. He revealed in his 2020 memoir that he was offered $14.5 million to return to the rom-com genre in a new movie, but he turned the money down because he didn’t want to go back to being pigeonholed.
“That was probably seen as the most rebellious move in Hollywood by me because it really sent the signal, ‘He ain’t fucking bluffing,'” McConaughey now said on the podcast. “And when you got someone who’s not bluffing, there’s something attractive about that. I think that’s what made Hollywood go, ‘You know what? He’s now a new novel idea. He’s a new bright idea.'”
Listen to McConaughey’s full interview on the “Good Trouble” podcast here.
