Actor gives green light to livin’ life to the fullest
MATTHEW McConaughey’s memoir, Greenlights, has a way of convincing you that being Matthew McConaughey is just about the easiest thing in the world. Look at his filmography, and you’ll see an actor who gutted his way to critical and commercial success: he started with cameos and low-budget indies in the 1990s, laboured in the rom-com salt mines in the early aughts, then pivoted to Oscar bait and prestige TV, finally reaching the mountaintop with a best actor Academy Award for Dallas Buyers Club in 2014.
That’s an achievement. But the man who made a meme out of Nietzsche’s notion that “time is a flat circle” isn’t going to tell a simple story about hard work and steady forward progress. By his reckoning, his fame wasn’t so much about raw ambition as much as it was with being preternaturally “alright, alright, alright” with everything, every step of the way.
Take a break from it all by heading to a monastery or RVing for three years? Perfect: “Driving the highways of America has always been my ideal office.”
McConaughey’s self-effacing slacker-cool attitude has made him an ideal masculine movie hero for our anxious moment. The world is on fire, but he has got you; he’s our mindful-breathing Brando. That has made him ripe for satire – his gnomic musings in car ads practically begged for it.
A great thing about the book is that the persona never sounds like a put-on. The bad thing, though, is he obviously wrote it himself and seems certain that in addition to being a memoirist he’s a certified motivational speaker and, worse, a poet.
McConaughey, who will turn 51 next month, recalls growing up in rural Texas, the son of parents who married three times and divorced twice. His father was a pugnacious character. A pipe salesman, he would recruit McConaughey’s brother for a urinating contest and once whipped up a scheme to have McConaughey claim emotional distress from a breakout-inducing skin cream, a ruse undone when he was presented with a photo naming him the most handsome man at his high school.
Later, McConaughey’s dad would fulfil his dream of dying while having sex, and how could McConaughey not be inspired by that kind of temperament?
“Yes, he called his shot all right,” McConaughey writes.
His first major film role was fittingly quirky: a in a hotel bar led to him to the role of Wooderson, the 20-something still stuck on chasing high-school girls. It’s where he uttered that first “alright, alright, alright” – “the very first words I said on the very first night of a job I had that I thought would be nothing but a hobby, but turned into a career”.
