Matthew McConaughey’s rebirth as possibly the most exciting and compelling actor to watch right now is so well known at this point that it has its own single-word descriptor: the McConaissance. After doing middling work for years, with the occasional glimpse of good work, McConaughey is in the middle of a resurgence, showing audiences that he is still the same acting who seemed so promising in Dazed and Confused and A Time to Kill.
What he has brought to his recent outstanding performances in Mud, Magic Mike, Bernie, Killer Joe, Dallas Buyers Club and The Wolf of Wall Street is an easy charisma that completely sucks us into his mesmerizing characters. But the characters themselves begin by being well written, fully formed concepts that he then does an excellent job bringing to life. It would have been easy for McConaughey to try to cling to his youthful sexual magnetism for as long as possible, but instead he opted for meatier roles that would use that energy in the service of compelling stories.
Even more exciting than the work he’s done to date is the remainder of his new HBO series, True Detective, in which he plays an eccentric police detective with hypnotic conviction. Then he has the Christopher Nolan picture Interstellar set to come out next summer, the trailer for which rests on his face, where age is beginning to show. The most encouraging thing about the McConaissance is that it shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon, and with performances from the actor like the one seen in the video below (which is very NSFW), that’s certainly a good thing.
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Published: Jan 27, 2014 11:56 am