فصل 07

Part 7 Be Brave, Take the Hill

FALL 2008

When facing any crisis, from Hurricane Katrina to a family emergency, to the profound choices we have to make in life, I’ve found that a good plan is to first recognize the problem, then stabilize the situation, organize the response, then respond. Aware that I needed more as an actor, I’d recognized the problem. Now it was time to pivot and stabilize my situation.

I called my money manager, Blaine Lourd, and asked how long I could go without working and still live the life we were accustomed to.

“You saved your money well, do what you need to do,” he said.

I called my agent, Jim Toth, and told him that I wanted to stop doing romantic comedies to find dramatic work that challenged me.

“No problem,” he quickly replied.

“What do you mean, ‘No problem’?” I asked. “My rom-coms have been bringing in a healthy 10 percent commission to your agency’s wallet for over a decade. What do you think your bosses are gonna say when you go in the Monday morning meeting and tell them, ‘McConaughey’s not doing romantic comedies anymore’!?” “I don’t work for them, Mr. McConaughey, I work for you.”

Mensch.

selfish

When I’m rich enough to not care about the money.

When a child’s life is more important than my own.

When my self-worth isn’t reliant on the adulation of others.

When I don’t care anymore, to outscore my desires,

I look near and within, and get self-ish.

This is the measure of a man’s greatness,

when a man becomes classic.

When mortal rewards are no longer enough to pay his rent,

man becomes legend.

Fish for yourself.

Self-ish.

It was a risky bet I was making. In Hollywood, if you pass on too many projects, they may quit asking. If you step out of your lane, and turn your back on what you’re successful at, the industry can turn its back on you. They don’t mind seeing you miss the bus because there’s plenty of people to take your seat. Again, it’s not personal, it’s just business.

I wet the floor with my tears talking to Camila about this decision. We cried. We prayed. We made a deal.

“It’s gonna be dry weather for a while, honey,” she said. “Who knows how long it will last. It’s going to be hard. I know you’re gonna get antsy, I know you’re gonna get wobbly, I know you’re gonna drink more, but…If we’re gonna do this, if we’re gonna commit to this change, then we’re gonna do it all the way. No half-assin it. Deal?” Just like my dad told me years ago.

“Deal.”

At a crossroads not a catastrophe, I knew my existential dilemma was going to cost me, monetarily sure, but even more so emotionally. The fatigue of not knowing if and when I would come out of it was going to be a test. By telling Hollywood, my mistress of the last almost twenty years, I still love you, but we need a break, and I’d rather be alone and happy than together and not, I was now in limbo. I’d purchased a one-way ticket to will notify. I prepared for the worst and hoped for the best.

Once you know it’s black, it’s not near as dark.

The holidays were coming up and I was looking forward to spending time with my family. The more family I could be around, the less I would think about the career I was walking away from, and the more I would be reminded of where I came from.

Each Christmas we all go to my brother’s ranch in West Texas for our yearly reunion. Everyone loads up their trucks and RVs with their kids and dogs and heads to the ranch, where we catch up with each other, drink, eat, and tell lies. During the days we hike the rugged West Texas terrain, deer hunt, ride horses, feed cows, watch bowl games on TV, and then end up around a campfire at night telling new stories and resurrecting old ones until deep into the morning. As religious as we were raised, these family gatherings now offered very little Christmas ritual besides opening presents on the twenty-fifth. No family sit-down dinner, no Bible readings, just all of us together for a five-day 24-7 onslaught of beef, bullshit, no curfews, optional showering, and drinking to remember, not to forget.

If anyone ever shows up on their high horse or is walkin on their toes, as Mom calls it, the rest of the family will rip them back down to earth until they cry for mercy, then we lift them back up off the ground and serve them a drink. There are always a few tears shed but a hundred percent forgiveness by the time we leave, because, as my brother Rooster says, “If everything we did was right, we’d never know what was wrong.” I’d been on the receiving end of a few of these humble pie interventions but not this year; no, my family knew I was going through a challenging time. If anything, they were wondering just what in the hell was wrong with me turning down regular work and hefty paychecks, but they could tell my mind was made up, and my family always respected sincere conviction, which I now had.

A couple days after Christmas, Rooster, Pat, and I were riding around the ranch sipping beers in Pat’s maroon dually truck when Pat, who was then and still is a pipe salesman working for Rooster, decided to call into his answering service to see what business-related messages he might have missed over the Christmas break. Pat had one of those 24-7 virtual receptionist services where you call in with your ID number and they relay your missed messages. He dialed the 1-800 digits.

“This is 812,” he says.

“Yes, 812, give me just a moment…”

Ten seconds pass.

“Um, sir. That account appears to not be active.”

“What do you mean ‘not active’?”

“I mean it is out of service, sir.”

“But that’s the ID you gave me to call in and check my messages.”

“I understand that, sir, but account 812 has, it says here, been inactive for over…two years.”

Pat, beginning to fume, immediately slammed the brakes, hopped out of the truck, and started yelling at the other end of the line, “What do you mean it’s been down for over two years! Do you know how many millions of dollars that I lost from business calls coming in, to me, to buy pipe, from me, and they couldn’t even leave a message, for me, because you had my account inactive!!! I am gonna sue your ass! I’m taking you to court! Two years my account’s been down and it’s your fault!” “Uh…sir, I’m just the person who answers the phone and connects people with their accounts, and yours, sir, is not active.” “I don’t give a damn what you say, I’ve probably lost at least ten million dollars because you haven’t been takin my messages in over two years! Ten million dollars, lady! That’s what I’m suing you for!” She hung up on him. Pat continued his rant.

“Don’t you dare hang up on me, you hear me! You OWE me!”

Finally closing his flip phone, Pat kicked the dirt, then turned to me and Rooster who had been witnessing the tirade.

“You believe that shit?! Two years they’ve had my account inactive, two fuckin years! I’m suing those fuckers for ten million! I’ll take this all the way to the Supreme Court if I have to!” That’s when Rooster asked Pat a question he obviously had not considered.

“Well, little brother, what do you think the judge is gonna say in court when he finds out that you didn’t even know it was down ‘cause you hadn’t even called in to check your messages in over two years?” Case closed.

I guess everybody in my family has a passion for prosecution, we just have trouble picking litigations we can win.

If we all made sense of humor the default emotion, we’d all get along better.

The next day, Camila, Levi, and I had to cut the holiday soirée short and head back home to take care of a more time-sensitive affair.

I believe trying to maintain a honeymoon glow in a relationship is a fool’s errand fantasy. Worse yet, it’s unfair to the two lovers trying to maintain it. It’s a 120-watt bulb that burns too hot to last. No one can live up to the pedestal we put them on if we always put them on one. As well, when we only see our lover as a superhuman, our reflection in their eyes makes us one to them in theirs. Then we’re both for rent, because we’re both unobtainable.

The honeymoon, like Hollywood, is an animated movie. It’s larger than life, not a reality we should expect to see once we exit the theater.

Where we live. Where our humanity lives. Where our secrets, scars, fears, hopes, and failures reside. This is what comes after the credits roll. Where real love cares, hurts, understands, falls down, and gets back up. Where it’s not easy, but we get to honestly try.

The twenty-watt bulb isn’t enough light to show the way if I expect you to be Wonder Woman and you only see me as Mr. Incredible.

The hundred-watt honeymoon bulb is superhuman.

By design.

It’s the beginning, the first time, the birth. That’s why it’s called a honeymoon, not a marriage. It’s not obtainable, or sustainable.

Until you have a daughter.

On January 3, 2010, Vida Alves McConaughey was born.

The only honeymoon that lasts forever.

Greenlight.

define success for yourself

I went to a voodoo shop south of New Orleans the other day . It had vials of “magic” potions stacked in columns with labels defining what they would give you: Fertility, Health, Family, Legal Help, Energy, Forgiveness, Money.

Guess which column was sold out? Money. Yep, money is king currency today. Money is success. The more we have, the more successful we are, right?

Even our cultural values have been financialized. Humility is not in vogue anymore, it’s too passive. We can get rich quick on an Internet scam, be an expert at nothing but everything if we say we are, get famous for our sex tape, and attain wealth, fame, rank, and power, even respect, without having a shred of competence for anything of value. It happens every day.

We all want to succeed. The question we need to ask ourselves is, What is success to us? More money? Okay. A healthy family? A happy marriage? Helping others? To be famous? Spiritually sound? To express ourselves? To create art? To leave the world a better place than we found it?

“What is success to me?” Continue to ask yourself that question. How are you prosperous? What is your relevance? Your answer may change over time and that’s fine, but do yourself this favor: Whatever your answer is, don’t choose anything that will jeopardize your soul. Prioritize who you are, who you want to be, and don’t spend time with anything that antagonizes your character. Don’t depend on drinking the Kool-Aid. It’s popular, tastes sweet today, but it will give you cavities tomorrow.

Life is not a popularity contest. Be brave, take the hill, but first, answer the question, “What is my hill?”

a year went by.

Dozens of romantic comedy offers came my way. Only romantic comedy offers came my way. I read them out of respect but I stayed the course, stuck to the plan, and ultimately passed on them all. Just how puritanical was I about it?

Well, I got a $5 million offer for two months’ work on one. I read it. I passed.

Then they offered $8 million. Nope.

They then offered $10 million. No, thank you.

Then $12.5 million. Not this time, but…thanks.

Then $14.5 million.

Hmmmm…Let me reread it.

And you know what? It was a better script. It was funnier, more dramatic, just an overall higher quality script than the first one I read with the $5 million offer. It was the same script, with the exact same words in it, but it was far superior to the previous ones.

I declined the offer.

If I couldn’t do what I wanted, I wasn’t going to do what I didn’t, no matter the price.

Truth’s like a jalapeño, the closer to the root the hotter it gets.

A sense of humor helped me cope, a strong woman by my side kept me steadfast, and an infant son and newborn daughter to raise kept me busy. Together, they all helped me navigate my self-induced hiatus from Hollywood. I continually had to reinforce my belief that my holdout was a form of delayed gratification, that today’s abstinence was an investment that would give me ROI tomorrow, that my personal protest was going to mail residuals to my soul down the road, that I was, as Warren Buffett says, buying straw hats in the winter. But being out of the limelight, not working, was taking its toll.

I’ve always needed work for my own sense of self-significance. For eighteen years, I’d had the honor of being addicted to acting and making movies, and now, without it, my dependency on it was causing a good amount of anxiety. With each rom-com offer that came in I couldn’t help but think about the opportunity to work again, on anything. My need for immediate personal accomplishment had me fighting against the temptation to do what I had always felt privileged to be able to do in the first place, while fighting for the necessity to have my art, my work, more resemble myself and my life.

Ten more months went by.

It was evident that the industry, the studio heads, the producers, the directors, the casting agents, all of them, had gotten my message because now nothing came in. No rom-coms, nada. Not one single offer. For anything.

A total of twenty months had passed where I said no to anything that had defined my brand before:

Rom-com guy. No.

Shirtless-on-the-beach guy. Nope, no beaches or paparazzi in Austin.

For twenty months I did not give the public or the industry any more of what they had banked on me to give them. No more of what they expected and even assumed to know. For twenty months I removed myself from the public eye. At home in Texas with Camila, I was raising Levi and Vida, gardening, writing, praying, visiting old friends, spending time with family, and recoiling from relapse. The industry didn’t know where I was, just what I wasn’t doing. Out of sight, I was out of mind. It seemed I was forgotten.

voluntary obligations

Moms and dads teach us things as children. Teachers, mentors, the government, and laws all give us guidelines to navigate life, rules to abide by in the name of accountability and order.

I’m not talking about those obligations. I’m talking about the ones we make with ourselves. The YOU versus YOU obligations. Not the societal regulations and expectations that we acknowledge and endow for anyone other than ourselves, these are faith-based responsibilities that we make on our own, the ones that define our constitution and character.

They are secrets with our self, personal protocols, private counsel in the court of our own conscience, and while nobody will give us a medal or throw us a party when we abide by them, no one will apprehend us when we don’t, because no one will know, except us.

An honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind, and when we lie down on ours at night, no matter who’s in our bed, we all sleep alone. The voluntary obligations are our personal Jiminy Crickets, and there are not enough cops in the entire world to police them — it’s on us.

Then, after just shy of two years of being gone from the industry and sending a very deliberate message to Hollywood as to what I was not anymore, I suddenly and unexpectedly became something, a new good idea.

The anonymity and unfamiliarity had bred creativity. Casting Matthew McConaughey as the defense attorney in The Lincoln Lawyer was now a fresh thought. Going to McConaughey for the lead in Killer Joe was now a novel notion.

Richard Linklater called me for Bernie.

Lee Daniels came to me for The Paperboy.

Jeff Nichols wrote Mud for me.

Steven Soderbergh called for Magic Mike.

Yes, by saying no.

The target drew the arrow.

I was remembered by being forgotten.

I had un-branded.

I was a re-discovery, and now it was time to invent.

My sacrifice complete, I had weathered the storm.

Organized, I knew what I wanted, and I was ready to respond.

It was time for me to say yes, and re-brand.

Fuck the bucks. I’m going for the experience.

Greenlight.

time and truth.

Two constants you can rely on.

One shows up for the first time every time while the other never leaves.

The offers came in droves, almost as many as after A Time to Kill. The difference this time was that I knew what roles and stories I wanted to do and my appetite for dangerous dramatic fare was ravenous. Camila’s appetite for her man carving his own path had teeth as well.

At one point I had offers for roles in The Paperboy, Magic Mike, and Mud, all three of which I dearly wanted to do, but their production schedules were going to be back to back to back if I did all three, leaving me only a few weeks in between each to prepare if I did them all.

I remember saying to Camila, “I think I have to choose two of the three so I have the eight weeks I need to prepare for the two movies I choose to do.” “You want to do all three?” she asked.

“Yeah, but the schedule’s too tight for me to prepare like I think I need to.”

“If you want to do all three, then reach between your legs and grab your pair, big boy, do all three, you’ll make it work.” I did and it did.

I’d read the Dallas Buyers Club script in 2007 and immediately attached myself to it as the actor who would play the lead character Ron Woodroof. Once again, I was drawn to a character on the fringes of society, an underdog, an outlaw, doing what was necessary to survive. Being attached meant I had control of the script and could try and get it made, as well as approve the director. For the few years before and during my twenty-month sabbatical, no directors or financiers were interested in making a period drama about AIDS with Rom-Com McConaughey in the lead. Even early into my re-branding phase, with the so-called McConaissance* picking up steam, nobody was interested. Plenty of other actors tried to take control of the script away from me, and many other directors wanted to make the film with someone other than me, but I held on to it with a firm hand.

Then, in January 2012, my agent told me a Canadian director named Jean-Marc Vallée had read the script and was interested in meeting me. I watched a film of his, C.R.A.Z.Y., and liked it for all the right reasons. Unsentimental humor and heart with anarchy wrapped around a dreamer’s humanity. It also had a badass soundtrack, which I still have no idea how he got on the low budget he had. This was exactly what I felt the Dallas Buyers Club script needed to bring it to life. We met in New York and discussed our passion for the project. Having recently done Magic Mike, I was in excellent physical shape.

“This character, Ron Woodroof, he has Stage 4 HIV, how are you going to look like you do?” he asked.

“Because it’s my job to and I will,” I told him. “It’s my responsibility to Ron.”

A week later he agreed to direct.

Jean-Marc, the producers Robbie Brenner, Rachel Winter, and I made a plan to make the film in October of that year. Weighing 182 pounds at the time, I had a lot of weight to lose. Five months out from our “agreed upon” start date, I began shedding weight. Three egg whites in the morning, five ounces of fish and a cup of steamed vegetables for lunch, the same for dinner, and as much wine as I wanted was my diet. I shed two and a half pounds a week like clockwork.

At 157 pounds, with more to lose, I received a call from Martin Scorsese offering me the two-day role of the broker-mentor Mark Hanna to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in the film The Wolf of Wall Street. Remember what I said about those launchpad lines? When I read the script and saw that Mark Hanna’s secret to successful stock brokering was cocaine and hookers, I took flight. Delusional or not, anyone who believes that could have an encyclopedia written about him. So I started writing it. In what was originally scripted as a much shorter scene, I went off into a lunatic-to-the-marvelous musical riff-rap that ended up being what’s in the film today.

Scorsese let me play and DiCaprio teed me up. And that chest-bumping hum tune? That was something I was doing before each take to relax and keep my rhythm—it was Leonardo’s idea for me to do it in the scene.

We’re all storytellers in the movie business. That’s what we do. We play make-believe. And when we do it well, we make you believe.

“We’re shooting in the fall,” I’d say to anyone who asked about Dallas Buyers Club and to everyone who didn’t.

Like my mom, I was not asking permission.

“There is no money to make this movie, Matthew. There. Is. No. Movie,” my agent said.

“Yes, there is,” I said. “We’re shooting in the fall.”

I was not going to flinch.

I continued to lose the weight needed to tell the story properly. Now down to 150 pounds from 182, my body was getting weak but my mind was getting stronger. Every pound I physically lost seemed to be sublimating in equal amount to more mental acuity. Like Ron, I was becoming clinical, meticulous, methodical, and a perfectionist. I needed three hours less sleep a night and could drink a bottle of wine until 2:00 a.m. and still be up at four to work on the script without an alarm clock. Feverishly obsessed with my man, I was on fire, and I loved it. The downfall was that while my mental game was on the mound in Game 7 of the World Series, the extreme weight loss seemed to relegate my libido to the dugout.

The screenwriter, Craig Borten, had given me over ten hours of cassette recordings of Ron while he was creating and then running his alternative HIV medication Buyers Club. I listened to them constantly, picking up intonation and intention, moments of bravado and vulnerability. There was one section of recording where he and another male voice were conversing with two other women who were in the background. There was a seditiously sexual undertone in the way they talked to each other, I could tell their carnal activity with each other was recent. But how? I thought. Ron’s got Stage 4 HIV? They couldn’t be…Unless they all had HIV. Of course. How interesting, how wild, how true. I took the tape to Jean-Marc and had him listen.

“Is there any way we can get this into the movie?” I asked.

“Wow, there is something so sad and beautiful about it,” he said, “but I don’t know how I could touch it without it seeming ugly.” Jean-Marc and I didn’t speak of it again, but as you’ll read, he never forgot it.

I drove to see Ron Woodroof’s sister and daughter in their home in a small rural town outside of Dallas. They greeted me with open arms and complete trust as the chaperone of their brother and father’s legacy. We watched old VHS tapes of Ron and the family, Ron on vacations, showing off for the camera, dressed for Halloween. They were honest about who Ron was, who he was not, and answered every question I had.

As we hugged goodbye, his sister asked, “Would you be interested in his diary? He kept one for years.”

“If you’d allow me, I’d be honored,” I said.

While the hours of tapes gave me an insight to the man from the outside in, the diary let me know who he was from the inside out. It was my secret key into Ron Woodroof’s soul. The diary told me who Ron was on lonely nights; it was where he shared his dreams and fears with no one but himself, and now me. His diary is how I found him, who he was after contracting HIV, but even more important who he was before. I remember a guy who would lie in bed on a weeknight smoking a joint, drawing doodles in a spiral notebook, writing things like, “Hope I get that call back tomorrow to go install those two JVC home speakers at Tom and Betty Wickman’s house. They live across town about 42 miles away so I figure $8 gas there and back, $6 for the monster cable speaker wire I gotta supply, that’ll clear me $24 off the $38 I’m charging ‘em to install the speakers. Hot damn! I’ll hit the Sonic afterwards and get me a double cheeseburger and a taste of Nancy.” Then he’d wake up early the next morning, iron his one pair of slacks, his short-sleeve button-down, and put a fresh AA battery in his pager while he sipped his second cup of coffee, preparing to make a $24 profit out of his day. Until his pager buzzed, Tom and Betty’s number.

“We’re gonna cancel the speaker install today, found a company that costs a little more than you but they’ll insure their work, thanks, Ron.” His heart would sink.

“Goddamnit,” he wrote.

Then he’d get high and head to that Sonic in spite of it all. Buy a single instead of a double and flirt up Nancy Blankenship, who he thought was pretty cute, especially how she roller-skated out to his car door with his food order and smiled her one-brown-tooth smile.

“She’s my lucky 16,” he wrote.

Come to find out, “16” was the room number of the nearest two-star motel where he and Nancy Blankenship would shag from time to time. That’s why she was lucky.

Ron invented things but wouldn’t follow up on a patent. He made plans but they never quite happened. He was a dreamer, and he couldn’t catch a break.

Meanwhile, Jean-Marc Vallée and the producers continued to cast and crew the film and scouted locations in New Orleans. They did not ask permission. They did not flinch. Still, it does take money to make a movie, and we were running out of time on our bluff. Except we weren’t bluffing, and I was still losing weight.

“We’re shooting in New Orleans in the fall! The start date is October first!” we declared again more loudly to anyone who asked and everyone who didn’t.

Finally someone believed us, or, believed in us, because that someone put up $4.9 million to finance the movie. It wasn’t the $7 million dollars the film was budgeted for, but it was enough to get us in the game. Eight days before we were to begin principal photography in New Orleans, I got a call from Jean-Marc.

“I do not know how I am going to shoot this film for $4.9 million,” he said. “The lowest possible budget to make it is seven mil but, if you will be there on day one, I will be there on day one, and we will make what we can make.” We both showed up.

“I’ve been thinking about that cassette recording you played me of Ron and the ladies and I have an idea,” Jean-Marc said to me a couple weeks into shooting.

“In the scripted scene where Ron’s business is doing well, what if you’re in your next-door motel-room office and you see, in the line of people coming in to buy their HIV drugs, a girl you find attractive, and you ask your secretary if the girl has HIV.

“’Yeah, full-blown HIV,’ she says back to you.

“Then we see Ron and this woman in the bathroom shower stall fucking, like, for need and survival.”

“Sounds beautiful and true; you know how to not make it ugly?” I asked.

“I do,” he said.

When you view the scene, you understand why he did. It’s human, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s funny. While Ron and the woman are shagging in the shower next door, Jean-Marc cuts to the office where we see the secretaries and patrons hearing them, then looking around at each other in mild surprise with mischievous grins of hilarity and compassion. With humor Jean-Marc exposed the humanity. What he did not know how not to make ugly, he made beautiful.

We made Dallas Buyers Club for 4.9 million dollars in twenty-five days.

We did not ask permission.

We did not flinch.

We took the hill.

I got down to 135.

Greenlight.