Matthew McConaughey Turned Down $14.5 Million In Rom-Com Money To Become A Serious Actor
Depending on which generation you’re from, Matthew McConaughey is the sunbleached creeper from Dazed and Confused, an Oscar-winning/Emmy-nominated actor, or the charming star of about a half-dozen romantic comedies from the 2000s. Matthew was so good at being the dude in rom-coms that he sort of became an industry prototype (you know they specifically asked for a “Matthew McConaughey type” when casting Sweet Home Alabama, absolutely no disrespect to Josh Lucas). Matthew cornered the market pretty tightly with rom-coms like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, The Wedding Planner, and Failure to Launch, but here was something more important to Matthew than paychecks, and that was artistic integrity. Wow, so I guess all those Teen Choice Award nominations meant nothing to you, huh.
The last rom-com that Matthew was in was 2009’s Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, the reviews of which were less than McConaugreat. The existence of a big stinky box office turkey might be enough for an actor to retire from a genre, but that wasn’t what made Matthew step away. It also wasn’t because Hollywood couldn’t find an actress brave enough to take a mouthful of snot while kissing him.
He writes in his new memoir/journaling project, Greenlights, that he really wanted to do something grittier or real-er, but the only offers coming in were for rom-coms, because he was so profitable. So he started turning down offers, like one for $14.5 million. via Yahoo! News:
“The romantic comedies remained my only consistent box office hits, which made them my only consistent incoming offers. For me personally, I enjoyed being able to give people a nitty-minute breezy romantic getaway from the stress of their lives where they didn’t have to think about anything, just watch the boy chase the girl, fall down, then get up and finally get her. I had taken the baton from Hugh Grant, and I ran with it.”
However, it came to the point where a $14.5 million offer had to be turned down, and while he does not say for which movie it was, he adds he had, “enjoyed making romantic comedies, and their paychecks rented the houses on the beach I ran shirtless on.”
“I declined the offer. If I couldn’t do what I wanted, I wasn’t going to do what I didn’t, no matter the price.”
His first project after Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was 2011’s The Lincoln Lawyer, which began to establish him as Serious Actor Matthew McConaughey. And then he won an Oscar in 2014, so it clearly paid off for him. But he didn’t reveal which rom-com he turned down, and he really didn’t give too many clues, which makes it insanely hard for us to speculate at home. It might be irrelevant because the point here is that Matthew ended his rom-com career without reaching the peak of his potential. When Matthew turned down that $14.5 million offer, he denied us all the chance to see a bong-ripping Texas beach bum with commitment issues finally settle down with the uptight flip-flop saleswoman of his dreams in a self-aware rom-com called Alright, Alright, I Do.
Pic: YouTube