Set to appear in White Boy Rick and Serenity (opposite Anne Hathaway) later this year, Matthew McConaughey’s reinvention is far from over.
The McConaissance, or the reinvention of actor and producer Matthew McConaughey, may have begun with legal drama The Lincoln Lawyer in 2011 but it is far from done.
Having starred in Killer Joe the same year as Lincoln Lawyer, the actor from Texas went on to star in films like The Paperboy, Mud, Magic Mike, Dallas Buyers Club, a cameo in The Wolf of Wall Street, The Sea of Trees, Free State of Jones, Gold and The Dark Tower with Dallas Buyers Club fetching him his first Oscar in 2014 in the category of Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role. It was a role for which Matthew lost forty-five pounds.
Not every single one of those films were perfect, far from it. But every film in the post-McConaissance era is a reminder of just how good of an actor Matthew McConaughey really is.
The good news is that McConaissance with that Texan drawl is coming our way with not one but two intriguing upcoming films that are diverse in terms of both the story and ideas.
The first one is White Boy Rick that is said to be based on the true story of a 14-year-old FBI informant in Detroit, circa 1984. In the film, newcomer Richie Merritt essays the titular role of an FBI informant who eventually deals drugs. Matthew stars as his father Rick Wershe Jr who can’t escape generational poverty and is a misguided father as the trailer shows. The hustling, the one-liners, Matthew shines in the trailer as he plays a blue-collar man unable to escape the choices he has made.
As USAToday noted, “McConaughey’s character is the flawed thinker who ultimately allows his son to enter the initially profitable crime world, only to have the FBI abandon him. Their moments of opulent euphoria are brief before it all turns bad.”
Speaking about the film that is set to release this September, Matthew said about the role at the trailer launch: “This guy was not equipped to handle his family. He’s singing the chorus, like, ‘We’re going to do this.’ But reality takes over and wins. And he loses.”
Director Yann Demange told EW of White Boy Rick: “The film is trying to identify with a different point of view, people in the margins that are often talked about at the moment by people who don’t really know or understand what it means to be poor in America and try to survive as a family.”
The second upcoming Matthew McConaughey film to catch our attention is Serenity which also includes Anne Hathaway and is going to play tricks with your mind because as the line goes in the trailer: “Sometimes we do bad things for good reasons.”
In Serenity, Matthew essays Baker Dill, a fishing boat captain living on Plymouth Island, a tropical location until his ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) arrives on his doorstep one night. We learn that Dill’s real name is John and he is outrunning his past. His ex, the mysterious Karen is an abused wife and asks Dill to take out her husband and kill him.
As EW noted about the trailer, “The tick of Dill’s fishing line punctuates the Serenity trailer, which is filled with flashes of steamy scenes, guns, mysterious figures, and a suicide. “
Crafting the perfect murder in a place where “everyone knows everything” is not easy and this seductive, mind-bending thriller of sorts is in complete contrast to Interstellar in which Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey starred together for the first time.
Set to release this October, Serenity is directed by Steven Knight and also stars Diane Lane, Jason Clarke and Jeremy Strong.
– With information from EW, Vulture and USAToday
