“I was like, ‘This person got a point.'” Matthew McConaughey was describing one of the stranger self-improvement exercises an Oscar winner has admitted to: two days alone in the West Texas desert with a bound stack of the worst reviews of his career. He told the story to Kind founder and Shark Tank investor Daniel Lubetzky on Build or Break, a weekly video podcast, in an episode titled “Matthew McConaughey Read 20 Years of Bad Reviews in One Weekend.”
His team has placed the trip near Marfa, around 2018 or 2019, when he was writing his memoir Greenlights. He kept only the pans, “not all the positive, the negative ones,” and turned them into what he called “a thick book.” “It’s all I took, and I spent two days looking at them, and it was hard.”
Two piles of critics
He came home with the reviewers sorted. The first group, in his telling, had decided before the opening credits: “from the very first sentence, this person has it out for me.” For those writers, “It didn’t matter if they saw the movie or not.”
The second group is the reason the clip spread. Some critics, McConaughey said, “write constructively about what you did wrong—and you can learn from it.” The fuller version of the “point” line is more generous than a headline can hold: “They’re actually a fan of mine, and they didn’t get from my performance what I was actually hoping they would’ve got.” That pushed him to a blunt question: “Where did I fail in achievement?”
One correction to the version circulating online. Summaries say some reviews “had a point”; his own words were “This person got a point.” He also named no critics, no films and no specific performances, and he did not say what, if anything, he changed afterward.
What was in the stack
The episode title’s “20 years” undersells it. Dazed and Confused, his first notable role, premiered in 1993, so by a 2018 trip he had 25 years of notices to choose from, and 26 by 2019.
The obvious candidates come from his romantic-comedy run, a nine-year stretch from The Wedding Planner in 2001 through 2003’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, 2006’s Failure to Launch, 2008’s Fool’s Gold and, finally, 2009’s Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Those films made him a leading man and also boxed him in; he has blamed his own “lifestyle, living on the beach, running with my shirt off, doing romantic comedies” for the typecasting.
Then came the turn critics later nicknamed the McConaissance. After two years away from film he took on The Lincoln Lawyer in 2011, followed by Bernie, Magic Mike and Mud. For Dallas Buyers Club (2013) he dropped nearly 50 pounds to play Ron Woodroof, a rodeo rider with AIDS, and won the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 2014 ceremony. In 2014 alone he also led the first season of True Detective and starred in Interstellar.
The acclaim did not make him review-proof. The Dark Tower (2017) drew negative notices, and Serenity, panned on release, came out in 2019, inside the window his team gives for the desert weekend.
The book he was working on then reached shelves on October 20, 2020, debuted at No. 1 on a national nonfiction best-seller list, and had logged 55 weeks there by February 2022. Not every review of it was kind either: one called it “stuffed with vaporous, circular proverbs for would-be McConaugheys.” The Build or Break conversation runs 1 hour and 3 minutes.
Further reading
Image: All-Pro Reels, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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