From 'Ghost of Girlfriend's Past' to 'Dallas Buyers Club,' McConaughey doesn't regret a one.
Before Matthew McConaughey was winning awards for his role in Dallas Buyers Club and being praised for his complicated character in True Detective, he dominated another genre: the romantic comedy.
His roles as a leading man in such films as Failure to Launch, How to Lose a Guy In 10 Days and Ghost of Girlfriends Past didn't win him any awards, but he says they were still tough acting jobs.
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"These things aren't easy. What’s hard is to make them look easy," he tells GQ magazine. "Those kinds of movies are what they are. They get pooh-poohed by critics. They get pooh-poohed by actors themselves. And in a way I get it, but in other ways it’s completely unfair."
But he wasn't afraid of getting typecast. "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."
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Further defending the romantic roles some would label interchangeable, the 44-year-old actor continues, "I wasn't scared like, 'Oh God, I'm going to be stuck here.' But I was like, I understand at some point that that is in italics now. So I said, 'You know what? I'm not going to be openly presenting that for a while. I'm going to un-brand.'"
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The "work hard, play hard" McConaughey also admits to GQ that the romcom filming process was a good time. "I did Fool's Gold in Australia, had a summer in Malibu, and made a surfer film -- basically, when you edit those all together, it was one continuous 90-degree day on the beach without a shirt," he recalls.
As for his real-life romance with Camila Alves, he says that his wife did have to put a little pressure on the actor to pop the question. "I wanted to really want to. You know, I didn't want it to be a destination; the fun is that we’re on the adventure together," he says. "And look, some of it had to do with her putting it on me. It took her going, ‘C’mon, Big Boy, Mr. Easygoing-We’ll- Get-to-It-When-We-Get-to-It. Either sh** or get off the pot.'"
The couple have three children together, and McConaughey couldn't be a more proud dad, gushing, "It's the one thing I've always wanted to be. Never is a man more of a man than when he is the father of a newborn."
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McConaughey certainly moved on from romcoms in 2013 and could earn yet another Oscar nom this year for his role in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. Check out his emotional performance in the trailer, below.