Matthew McConaughey’s endless summer of the aughts was the stuff of legends. In between shirtless runs on the beach, he squeezed in a perpetual stream of romcoms, or perhaps it was the other way around. Even though he’s been crushing it as a dramatic actor for several years (Including Dallas Buyers Club, True Detective, and so on), his romcoms will never fade away, even if they faded into each other. In his new memoir, Greenlights, McConaughey details why he did so many fluff movies, and why he had to quit them.
It all started so innocently. McConaughey wrote (via Us Weekly) that these films were his “only consistent box-office hits,” which is why he kept finding them tossed his way. How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, Failure To Launch, Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past, Fool’s Gold — the box-office hits kept coming, and as McConaughey explained things, he was happy with obliging for awhile.
“The romantic comedies remained my only consistent box office hits, which made them my only consistent incoming offers,” the Wolf of Wall Street actor wrote. “For me personally, I enjoyed being able to give people a nitty-minute breezy romantic getaway from the stress of their lives where they didn’t have to think about anything, just watch the boy chase the girl, fall down, then get up and finally get her. I had taken the baton from Hugh Grant, and I ran with it.”
There’s nothing wrong with some frivolity, but eventually, things grew monotonous, even though, as McConaughey continued, “I enjoyed making romantic comedies, and their paychecks rented the houses on the beach I ran shirtless on.” So, he eventually had to shut down the fun, and after a $14.5 million offer arrived in 2010, McConaughey realized that he’d gone too far. “If I couldn’t do what I wanted,” he concluded. “I wasn’t going to do what I didn’t, no matter the price.” And as the rest of the story goes, McConaughey’s been alright, alright, alright ever since.
(Via Us Weekly)
