Matthew McConaughey

Matthew McConaughey (born November 4, 1969, Uvalde, Texas, U.S.) is an American actor whose virile good looks and Southern charm established him as a romantic leading man, a status that belied an equal ability to evince flawed, unpleasant characters.

McConaughey, the youngest of three sons born to an oil pipeline supplier and a teacher, was raised in Longview, Texas. He enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, originally intending to study law. He ultimately switched to film production and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1993. By that point he had already begun appearing in commercials and had been cast as a lothario with an existentialist streak in director Richard Linklater’s high-school comedy Dazed and Confused (1993). The role, initially consisting of only a few lines, was expanded to give McConaughey’s likeable layabout more screen time. On the strength of that performance, he accrued supporting roles in such films as Angels in the Outfield (1994), Boys on the Side (1995), and Lone Star (1996).

McConaughey assumed the lead role of a lawyer defending a black man (played by Samuel L. Jackson) accused of murdering two white men who had raped his daughter in A Time to Kill (1996), based on John Grisham’s novel of the same name. He jousted romantically and philosophically with Jodie Foster in Contact (1997), based on Carl Sagan’s novel about communication with aliens, and he heisted banks as one of the titular brothers in Linklater’s The Newton Boys (1998). His performance in EDtv (1999), a comedy about a man who becomes an early reality television star, was eclipsed by Jim Carrey’s in the similar The Truman Show, released the year before. A turn as a headstrong lieutenant in the World War II submarine thriller U-571 (2000) was similarly ignored. However, McConaughey’s arrest on charges of marijuana possession and violation of a noise ordinance in Austin in 1999 enshrined him in the pop culture legendarium as the archetypal jovial stoner. The actor was found by police playing bongo drums in the nude in celebration of a football victory.

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McConaughey nonetheless appeared as a string of relatively clean-cut heartthrobs in romantic comedies that included The Wedding Planner (2001), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), Failure to Launch (2006), Fool’s Gold (2008), and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009). Starring opposite leading ladies that included Jennifer Lopez, Kate Hudson, and Sarah Jessica Parker, McConaughey proved to be a reliable box-office draw and attracted as much attention for his toned physique and rakish smile as for his acting skills. Other films during that period included the adventure romp Sahara (2005), the football drama We Are Marshall (2006), and the Hollywood satire Tropic Thunder (2008).

McConaughey returned to more-substantial fare with The Lincoln Lawyer (2011), a legal drama in which he was featured as a lawyer who does business out of the backseat of a car. He then chewed up the screen as a viperous hit man in Killer Joe (2011), based on the stage play by Tracy Letts. McConaughey next played a closeted reporter in the salaciously comic Southern noir The Paperboy (2012), a crudely avuncular murderer in the coming-of-age tale Mud (2012), and a male strip-club owner in Steven Soderbergh’s acclaimed drama Magic Mike (2012).

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In Dallas Buyers Club (2013) he portrayed Ron Woodroof, a man who starts a business smuggling HIV/AIDS medications into the United States after he finds that he has contracted the disease and is unable to legally obtain lifesaving treatment. The role, for which McConaughey lost some 40 pounds, earned him a number of accolades, including an Academy Award for best actor. He later starred in Interstellar (2014) as the pilot of a spaceship seeking another habitable planet, in Free State of Jones (2016) as a Confederate soldier who incites a rebellion in favour of Unionist principles, and in Gold (2016) as a brackish prospector who strikes it rich in the jungle in Indonesia. McConaughey also supplied the voice of a samurai beetle in Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) and a koala in Sing (2016) and Sing 2 (2021).

McConaughey then appeared as a villainous sorcerer in The Dark Tower (2017), an adaptation of a popular book series by Stephen King, and as the father of a teenage FBI informant and drug trafficker in White Boy Rick (2018). McConaughey’s credits from 2019 included Serenity, a thriller in which his character is solicited by his ex-wife (Anne Hathaway) to commit murder; The Beach Bum, in which he played a pot-smoking poet; and The Gentlemen, a crime dramedy about a drug kingpin trying to sell his marijuana empire.

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McConaughey’s television work included a turn (2014) as a nihilistic police officer investigating an occult murder in the HBO television drama True Detective.

In 2020 McConaughey published the memoir Greenlights, which included various life lessons.