Matthew McConaughey was once known as the king of romantic comedies. In the 90s, it was almost impossible to see a trailer without him as the leading man. But, that role grew old for the actor. In a recent episode of Good Trouble with Nick Kyrgios, a video podcast series hosted by tennis maverick Nick Kyrgios, McConaughey revealed why he stopped saying yes at the peak of his popularity, and the blow his career took for it for some time.
“Look, man, the devil’s in the infinite yeses, not the no’s,” he told Kyrgios in an exclusive clip from the podcast. “No, it’s just as important, if not more important. Especially if you have some level of success and access. No becomes more important than yes. Because, I mean, we all look around and see we’ve overleveraged our life with yeses and gone, geez, oh, man, I’m making C minuses and all that s— in my life because I said yes to too many things.”
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He says he said yes to every movie role he’d get, and all of them were the same. “When I was rolling off the rom-coms. And I was the rom-com dude, man,” McConaughey explained. “That was my lane, and I liked that lane. That lane paid well and it was working. But the lane was… I was so strong in that lane that anything outside of that lane, dramas and stuff that I wanted to do, were like, no, no, no, no, no McConaughey. Hollywood said no, no, no, no, you should stay there, stay there.”
He continued, “I didn’t want to. So, since I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, I stopped doing what I was doing. And I moved down to the ranch in Texas, and I went down there and I made a pact with my wife and said, ‘I’m not going back to work unless I get offered roles I want to do.’”
He also turned down an unnamed action comedy that he was given a $14.5 million offer to star in. “I think that was the one that was probably what was seen as the most rebellious move in Hollywood by me, because it really sent the signal, he ain’t f—ing bluffing,” McConaughey remembered about turning down the offer. “And when you got someone who’s not bluffing, there’s something attractive about that. I think that’s what made Hollywood go, ‘You know what? He’s now a new novel idea. He’s a new bright idea.’”
Despite some dry years, things eventually turned around. He’d later star in films like Magic Mike, and Dallas Buyers Club, the film he would win an Oscar for. He says the payoff was worth it. “When those offers came, I would salivate, man. And I just bit on and went back to back to back and worked as much as I could and loved it and felt every bit of it.”
