McConaughey drawn to intimate sci-fi epic

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LOS ANGELES — At this point in his career, a big, expensive studio blockbuster in the vein of Interstellar might be the most dangerous possible move for Matthew McConaughey.

The 44-year-old actor is coming off a run of critical acclaim in smaller independent projects. He chilled as a lawman moonlighting as a hit man in William Friedkin’s Killer Joe. He showed a hitherto unexplored vulnerable side as a lovelorn fugitive who befriends a boy in Mud.

The guy who once expressed his credo as “Just keep livin'” explored a decidedly darker, nihilist philosophy as an irretrievably damaged cop in the HBO series True Detective.

Capping off this run, he won a Best Actor Oscar for his role as a heterosexual rodeo redneck-turned-unlikely AIDS activist in Dallas Buyers Club.

It seems a galaxy far, far away when McConaughey played the studio game and traded on his sex appeal, taking his shirt off in dismal rom-coms (Failure to Launch, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) and dubious action movies (Sahara).

At a press conference for Interstellar, the leather-jacket-clad Texan says his new approach to the work ties into the situation of the character he plays, Cooper, an astronaut sent on a mission that may save the human race, even as it may separate him forever from his beloved children.

“Early on, in our approach, (director Christopher Nolan) and I talked about being obsessed, that the job that you’re doing right now could be your last one, or at least approach it like it is your only one,” he says.

“And that’s a great way to go into anything,” he says. “So with respect to what’s happened to me over the last couple of years, I have more obsession over what I’m doing at this moment.

“It could be the last one. Hope it’s not. But it could be.”

McConaughey certainly was attracted to Nolan’s go-big-or-go-home approach to cinema

“This is a science-fiction film that goes to the furthest limits that we’ve seen on film before,” he asserts.

“He gets more scope and scale on film than any director out there,” he says. “But, at the same time, you have such an intimate story. And it’s the intimacy that makes the epic size feel so grand.”

The intimate story behind the big bang boom of Interstellar is Cooper’s relationship with his daughter. McConaughey, who is himself the father of three, had to look no further than the director’s chair to see the inspiration behind the screenplay (especially since the role of the girl was originally written by primary screenwriter Jonathan Nolan as a male).

“Chris has a daughter,” he says. “And it was apparent to me early on that this was about family, that this was about parents and children. I think that’s the aorta of the film, emotionally.”

That said, it’s not as if McConaughey didn’t enjoy taking on the role of an astronaut in an adventure that traverses time and space.

“I wanted to be in an epic-scale picture where I could be a pilot in space,” he says.

“But I also wanted to do something that felt very personal, that I could have an experience in,” he says. “And I was able to do that.

“It’s not an easy thing to do to be able to say that one film is both those things,” he says. “Usually you get one or the other.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca