By Are you feeling ... alright, alright alright, Matthew Mcconaughey? Far be it from us to question the methods of a man who leapt effortlessly from rom-com pin-up to Academy Award-winning actor, but his slate of 2019 movies look a little, eccentric.
Next month the Texan will appear in two films: a drama alongside Anne Hathaway called Serenity and with Snoop Dogg in Beach Bum, the new release from Spring Breakers director Harmony Korine.
In the former, McConaughey plays a moody fishing boat captain whose past is about to 'crash up against his life on a small Caribbean island'. "I'm not called John anymore," he says mysteriously while playing with his lighter in true Rust Cohle style in the trailer. Despite big-hitters in the cast and the directorial talent of Peaky Blinders' Steven Knight at the helm, Serenity seems destined to sink with the release date sat purposefully just outside the Oscar-contention window and reviews calling it "the year's first gloriously bad movie".
Then in Beach Bum he plays Moondog, a bong-smoking poet who tries to procure acid from a convenience store and generally treats life like a pic 'n mix selection. “Life’s a fucking rodeo,” he muses “I’m gonna suck the nectar out of it and fuck it raw dog ’til the wheels come off.”
While these both sound like a fun trip to the cinema - and refreshing after the heaviness of award season - it's another gear change from the string of roles which earned him award recognition and spawned the much-fabled McConaissance.
After being the early noughties go-to guy for romantic comedies such as How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days and Failure to Launch, the actor begun what has since been spun as a self-imposed retreat into Hollywood Siberia, turning down roles of chiselled but lovable fops left, right and centre in order to find his true calling.
The result was roles in increasingly brilliant films from the turn of the decades onwards, from Killer Joe and Mud to the eventual Oscar-winner Dallas Buyers Club. He then followed it all up by playing Rust Cohle in 2014 crime drama series True Detective - a sublime performance which gripped audiences in a way that's now near-impossible for a single series. Even the lighter films in this golden period, such as Magic Mike and The Wolf of Wall Street, saw praise heaped on his performances.
With a shiny Oscar and a tidy transformation story established, McConaughey's future as a Serious Film Actor, and his pick of roles, seemed assured. Instead his work since have been a string of films with middling-to-poor reviews such as Gold, Stephen King sci-fi fantasy The Dark Tower and last month's biographical crime drama White Boy Rick.
Should his 2019 schedule be taken as a sign the actor has left behind the critically-acclaimed / pensive smoking stage of his career and reentered the fun-guy-on-the-beach phase? A sort of on-screen retirement?
McConaughey himself has been quick to distance himself from the narrative around the 'McConaissance' thing, saying, "That whole thing was much less of a 180 for myself than people seemed to think."
"There was this narrative of ‘then’ and ‘now’. I didn’t get a new acting coach or take a new class. I just said, ‘Fuck the bucks—I’m going for the experience’ in the things I was choosing."
The media interpreted his decision to take on serious topics like the AIDS crisis and lose weight for a role as a sign we could stick him in the Oscar-bait box forevermore. But clearly, to Mcconaughey, winning awards doesn't close the door to having fun making movies.
He's next slated to appear in Guy Ritchie's very Guy Ritchie-sounding heist film Toff Guys, but given what a supremely talented actor McConaughey is, don't be surprised if he follows that up with the 2020 award season darling of the year and has the last laugh. Just like Moondog, McConaughey's clearly sucking the nectar out of life.
