All you need to know about Matthew McConaughey's newest interview in GQ is that he opens with possibly the most winkingly self-indulgent Oscar Wilde quote. If you know your Oscar Wilde, you know that's really making a statement. "A man should always have his diary on him. That way he's guaranteed to always have something incredible to read," McConaughey tells the magazine. With that, he's off on what we now know is the McConaughian astral plane of thought, with the same pearls of wisdom the actor drops during award acceptance speeches and Lincoln commercials.
First and foremost, you should know that he's grateful for the McConaissance of the past two years, but he's never worried about his career. Even when he was known for being the guy running around shirtless on the beach in romantic comedies, Matthew McConaughey has always been copacetic with his choices.
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"I've never had fears that I was stuck in one thing. I'm sure we're going to talk about the years when I was in romantic comedies, and I was seen as the guy who was on the beach, running around shirtless. I did that. Damn right, that was me," McConaughey tells GQ. Rather than letting himself get pigeonholed, McConaughey decided to "un-brand."
He decided to own the shirtlessness, since it was an extension of his own laid-back surfer vibe. Plus, he thinks people need to realize that making romantic comedies is harder than you think. "These things aren't easy. What's hard is to make them look easy...There's a buoyancy you need to make them work. I believe I gave them buoyancy," McConaughey says of films such as The Wedding Planner, Failure to Launch, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.
McConaughey also makes an interesting point that usually gets overlooked about gender roles in rom-coms. "What's a romantic comedy? Boy meets girl. They get together. Something happens. Girl takes off. Boy chases girl. They get back together. The end. A lot of times the male is somewhat emasculated, meaning he has to crawl back and say, 'I'm nothing without you. If you don't take me back, I'm nothing.' And I was always like, 'What girl wants that guy?'"
You know what? Cheers to Matthew McConaughey for bothering to look for nuance in what are traditionally two-dimensional characters painted with the broadest of strokes. Or, should we say, "All right, all right, all right." (GQ)