In all his homespun wisdom, Matthew McConaughey doesn’t think the world is a stage — he thinks it’s a story told by the fire. Am I trying to build bonfires instead of just campfires? Yeah,” the Oscar-winner says, reflecting on his legacy before he’s honored with Variety’s Legend & Groundbreaker Award at Filmland in Arkansas on Friday.
Over the last 30 years, he’s tended the flames at the multiplex (from “Dazed and Confused” and “Mud” to “Interstellar” and “Dallas Buyers Club”), on the small screen (his Emmy-nominated turn in “True Detective”), with his Just Keep Livin’ foundation for high schoolers and as a professor at his alma mater, the University of Texas. He and his wife Camila Alves McConaughey’s children: Levi, 18, Vida, 16, and Livingston, 13. They live on, and how much of you can they carry forward,” McConaughey says, breaking into his famous laugh before launching into another metaphor.
I like it when the broccoli tastes like candy. It’s nice when something tastes really good and is good for you. That’s the kind of honey hole I’m shooting for, you know?” With each role McConaughey chooses to tackle, he keeps those fires burning.
He’s calling from Italy, where he just wrapped filming on Netflix’s “Positano,” a slick international caper starring fellow Oscar winner Zoe Saldaña as a rival thief. As a lover of jewel-heist movies, the actor says the script aligned with his creative instincts — plus filming along the Amalfi Coast felt like a “working vacation.” “The tone of the script should feel like you’re dancing across the sunset,” he says, describing the film. The eight-episode series, which begins streaming Sept. 23, sees the pair play fictionalized versions of themselves, whose friendship is thrown into chaos when they learn they might actually be brothers.
And while “Brothers” is a rollicking good time, “The Rivals of Amziah King” is the type of lo-fi local lore that sparks McConaughey’s artistic fires. In it, he plays the title character — a beekeeper, bluegrass musician and pillar of his rural Oklahoma community who reunites with his former foster daughter, Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), and fends off threats to his honey business. But I just know these people,” the native Texan says.
The way that you bring in misfits and you give them a place of belonging. As long as you’re honest about who you are, we don’t give a damn.” Above all, McConaughey was attracted to the story’s innocence. It’s a “love story for the underdogs,” he explains.
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