Matthew McConaughey on Moving to Texas to Escape Being the “Rom-Com Dude”

Matthew McConaughey is opening up about his decision to escape being labeled as “the rom-com dude,” and aiming for something greater in Hollywood.

The Oscar-winning actor recently sat down with tennis pro Nick Kyrgios for the Good Trouble podcast, where he talked about finally learning to say no, leading to his “most rebellious move” in the industry while trying to stay true to himself.

“Look, man, the devil’s in the infinite yeses, not the no’s,” McConaughey said in a preview clip of the episode set to be released on Wednesday. “No, it’s just as important, if not more important. Especially if you have some level of success and access. No becomes more important than yes. Because, I mean, 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 shit in my life because I said yes to too many things.”

While the actor appreciates his time working on all the rom-coms early in his career, such as The Wedding Planner, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days and Fool’s Gold, he eventually found himself on “autopilot.” And that’s when McConaughey realized he had to just say “nope, full stop, no.”

“When I was rolling off the rom-coms. And I was the rom-com dude, man, that was my lane, and I liked that lane. That lane paid well and it was working,” the Magic Mike actor explained. “But the lane was… 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.”

He continued, “I didn’t want to. So, since I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, I stopped doing what I was doing. And I moved down to the ranch in Texas, and I went down there and I made a pact with my wife [Camila Alves McConaughey] and said, ‘I’m not going back to work unless I get offered roles I want to do.'”

And McConaughey stood by that pact for two years. He previously wrote in his 2020 memoir Greenlights about that time in his life, “For 20 months I did not give the public or the industry any more of what they had banked on me to give them. No more of what they expected and even assumed to know. For 20 months I removed myself from the public eye.”

While the Interstellar actor admitted that he was tempted by several offers, including a $14.5 million offer to star in an unnamed action comedy, he knew he had to show he wasn’t “fucking bluffing” and turned them down.

“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 fucking bluffing,” he said. “And when you got someone who’s not bluffing, there’s something attractive about that. I think that’s what made Hollywood go, ‘You know what? He’s now a new novel idea. He’s a new bright idea.'”

Following a few “wobbly” years, as McConaughey described, his patience paid off and ultimately landed him roles in more dramatic projects, including Mud, Interstellar and Dallas Buyers Club, the latter of which scored him an Academy Award.

“When those offers came, I would salivate, man,” he added. “And I just bit on and went back to back to back and worked as much as I could and loved it and felt every bit of it.”