Matthew McConaughey is one of the A-list actors in the movie business.
But his career hasn’t played out like a typical Hollywood star.
And Matthew McConaughey revealed the surprising reason that he walked away from Hollywood.
Matthew McConaughey left Hollywood to go home to Texas at the peak of his career
Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey made the surprising decision to leave Malibu, California to move back home to his native Texas with his wife, Camila Alves, and three children in 2014.
He said that leaving Hollywood was the best move for his career on the Good Trouble with Nick Kyrgios podcast.
One of the hard things that McConaughey had to learn in the movie business was how to tell people no.
“No, is just as important, if not more important. Especially if you have some level of success and access. No becomes more important than yes,” McConaughey explained. “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.”
McConaughey became typecast in the 2000s after he starred in a string of hit romantic comedies like How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, The Wedding Planner, and Failure to Launch.
It seemed like his life and his career were on “autopilot” at that point.
“I was the rom-com dude, man, that was my lane, and I liked that lane. That lane paid well and it was working,” McConaughey recalled. “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.”
McConaughey changed the trajectory of his career
The actor starred in his last romantic comedy in 2009’s Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and took two years off from acting afterward.
McConaughey said that because he couldn’t get the roles he wanted, he just stopped acting.
“I moved down to the ranch in Texas,” McConaughey said. “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 turned down a part in an action comedy that would have paid him $14.5 million.
“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 explained. “I think that’s what made Hollywood go, ‘You know what? He’s now a new novel idea. He’s a new bright idea.’”
Digging in his heels and holding out the part that he wanted paid off in spades.
McConaughey played a serious part in the 2013 drama Dallas Buyers Club and won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2014.
The movie only paid $200,000 but it delivered him his only Oscar.
Staying true to himself paid off for Matthew McConaughey with the biggest success of his career.
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