Matthew McConaughey

Matthew McConaughey has built a screen career around an unusually flexible kind of movie-star ease. He can be relaxed, charming and funny, but there has often been something more restless underneath—a quality that eventually carried him from romantic leads into some of his most demanding dramatic work. Born in Uvalde, Texas, on November 4, 1969, McConaughey studied Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. After early work in television commercials and a small appearance in My Boyfriend’s Back, he found his breakout role as Wooderson in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. The part was initially small, but it grew during production, giving McConaughey room to establish the loose confidence that would become an early screen signature. His 1990s films quickly showed a wider range. He played lawyer Jake Brigance in A Time to Kill, appeared opposite Jodie Foster in Contact and portrayed Roger Sherman Baldwin in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad. The following decade made him a dependable romantic-comedy lead through films including The Wedding Planner, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch and Fool’s Gold. McConaughey later acknowledged that this run had left him typecast and began pursuing more dramatic material. That change produced a striking sequence of performances. He played a fugitive in Mud, district attorney Danny Buck Davidson in Bernie and club owner Dallas in Magic Mike. His portrayal of Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club earned him the Academy Award, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award for leading actor. Around the same period, he appeared as Mark Hanna in The Wolf of Wall Street, starred as Rust Cohle in True Detective and played widowed father and astronaut Cooper in Interstellar. McConaughey has also worked as a voice actor, producer and screenwriter. Later roles have ranged from animated films Kubo and the Two Strings and Sing to Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen. Across comedy, crime, science fiction and drama, his best work uses that familiar composure not as an endpoint, but as something a character may be hiding behind.