Matthew McConaughey is finally back – but his new role isn’t what you expect

For someone who’s spent most of the last six years not acting, Matthew McConaughey has stayed remarkably in the conversation. Whether it was his best-selling memoir Greenlights, his brief flirtation with politics, or those signature musings about life, the man has hardly been invisible. Even getting attention for his sporting passions!

But when it comes to seeing him on screen — really seeing him, not just hearing his voice in Sing 2 — it’s been a long time. And now, for the first time in over half a decade, McConaughey is back.

Why did McConaughey disappear from Hollywood?

Turns out, stepping away from Hollywood was less about Hollywood and more about McConaughey needing to get his own house in order. After decades of being everyone’s favorite Texan on screen – whether as a smooth-talking lawyer or a shirtless philosopher – McConaughey took a deliberate pause. As he puts it to Variety, he “needed to write [his] own story” and spent his hiatus pulling together Greenlights, a wildly popular mashup of memoir, prayer book, and life manual.

But while working through diary entries and life lessons, something in him shifted. Writing made him more honest – and that honesty, he says, has made him a better actor. “It cleared up things you’ve been thinking about for 35 years,” McConaughey explains. ”And it makes you realize that’s kind of who you are, Matthew. Let’s admit that and shake hands.”

What brought McConaughey back to acting?

It wasn’t the promise of a blockbuster or a fat paycheck. What lured him out of semi-retirement was an offbeat script from director Andrew Patterson – a story about a honey operation in rural Oklahoma, complete with a caravan of bee-keepers and traveling musicians. And a man named Amziah King at the center of it all.

When McConaughey read The Rivals of Amziah King, he recognized the world Patterson had created. “It’s not where I grew up,” he says, “but I know of these kind of people and these kind of characters that live in the middle of the country.” These are folks, as he puts it, who “know the Constitution, they know the rules they are living by, and they’re not looking for or getting approval from the rest of the world.”

McConaughey admits in the interview to feeling “creaky” coming back after so long. Yet by the end of filming, he remembered why he does it. “I remembered, hey, McConaughey, you’re pretty damn good at this,” he says. “And I remembered that acting is a vacation for me... When I’m performing, it’s my singular focus.”

McConaughey was the one for Amziah

Director Andrew Patterson, who spent years shaping and reshaping the project – even briefly turning it into a seven-episode series – says he always saw McConaughey as Amziah. He wanted someone with natural magnetism, someone who could float between comedy and drama without ever seeming out of place.

“I wanted an actor with the type of personality where he could just hang out with them for hours,” Patterson says. “Somebody so disarming, who would just do their thing inside this world I was trying to evoke.”

Check out the full interview, including the story of Matthew showing up on the first day with a swollen eye from a bee sting.

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