Hot Actor: Matthew McConaughey
If you’re asking just who is this Matthew McConaughey who’s supposedly about to be way too famous for his own good, congratulations: You’ve dodged a new media cottage industry announcing his arrival as a young leading man who’s not just hot but sparkling and spitting like metal in the microwave. “People keep saying, ‘Hollywood is going to take him by storm,’ ” says Sandra Bullock, his co-star in A Time to Kill. “I think it’s the other way around. And Matthew will do it right.”
The résumé is brief. He discovered himself four years ago by approaching casting agent Don Phillips in a bar in Austin, Texas. He talked himself into the role of the aging, slouchingly irresistible jock Wooderson (“That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older – they stay the same age. Yes, they do.”) in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, cranked out a turbocharged turn as a blood-thirsty tow-truck driver in The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (available on video only outside the United States), played the cop who loves honor even mare than Drew Barrymore in Boys on the Side, shagged screaming liners in Angels in the Outfield, played iconic sheriff Buddy Deeds in John Sayles’ Lone Star and, as the media won’t let you forget, was the surprise, high-stakes pick of author John Grisham and director Joel Schumacher to star as Mississippi lawyer Jake Brigance in A Time to Kill. That role, in which the established and adored Bullock supports him, sparked the thousand-throated buzz. After the first preview of A Time to Kill, every schlub producer and agent in Hollywood grabbed the lapels of the guy next to him and chittered like an orangutan over the fact that the movie is OK but Matthew McConaughey is a bona fide, everybody-else-is-so-five-minutes-ago star. The brain-addling part of it is, they’re probably right.
The very heft of the people stacking up around this young Texan means that the prophecy of stardom will be at least partly self-fulfilling. He has a quartet of agents at CAA, a comfortably imperial press agent, a rumored film-goddess girlfriend (Ashley Judd, whose reps explained that due to some snaky algebra of promotional commitments Ms. Judd would not be answering our questions about her A Time to Kill co-star) and some very good friends like Sandra Bullock. “He’s a character actor in a leading-man’s body, and he’s going to change the face of what we demand from male actors,” says Bullock. “We’ll demand for them to push themselves more. He’s not just another beautiful face.”
It’s probably best cto take a deep breath and tie your shoelaces just before you meet Matthew McConaughey. (Full first name, please, and the last one ends with what horses eat.) At 26, he’s the kind of good company Texas mythology calls for – not that corn-pone, frenetic thing but a figure moving with steady and slightly mysterious energy, like a plume of dust across the Texas plain. What he likes best in life, he will say, “is when I’ve got something out there, a post that’s stuck in the ground. I know I’m going in that direction, and there it is, I won’t be able to miss it. That makes the steps to get there cooler and easier.” Falling in with those steps can require a couple of catch-up skips, especially if he’s inadvertently just made you jump in the dark barroom by arriving for a rendezvous not just quietly but punctually. Bearded and shaggier on top than the clean-cut lawyer he portrays in A Time to Kill, McConaughey looks you bang in the eyes from underneath a high-arching brow, shakes hands and conveys a momentum that immediately makes clear you will be leaving the aforesaid dark bar and going on down the road to the sushi place, if that’s OK with you, and once you’re in his big, new black G.M.C. Yukon, having taken care not to brush up against the second skin of powdered dirt that covers same (was that “Hell Bent” scrawled with a finger on the side window?), you realize you’re already in some free-floating extension of chez McConaughey, a place where even squares can have a ball, where talk is loud over the noise of the throaty motor and a murder song from Chicago dada-country hoo-hahs the Handsome Family. “In the dark,” he lip-syncs along, “your hair’s just as red, and this long, dark cave will always be our wedding bed.”
Hot Actor: Matthew McConaughey, Page 1 of 4