Matthew McConaughey has starred in some of the best romantic comedies of the past few decades, with titles including The Wedding Planner, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, Fool’s Gold and Failure To Launch, to name a few. But just because the actor seems made for the feel-good formula doesn’t mean he agrees with how his characters are written. McConaughey got real about what he has always hated about the men in rom-coms.
The relationship between Matthew McConaughey and the romantic comedy genre has been a complicated one. Some of McConaughey’s best movies have been rom-coms, but years ago he chose to stop doing them. He opened up about the biggest challenge he faced when working within that tried-and-true formula, telling a crowd at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts:
Our challenge was always in the third act. Because we know the story of [a] rom-com. Boy meets girl, they’re going to go through the second act, they’re gonna play some mischief on each other, one’s gonna find out the other one’s kind of not being straight with them, they’re gonna break apart. And then third act begins, boy chases girl, catches her, maybe get a kiss, the credits roll, we’re happy they did it.
Wow, he’s really got that down to an art, doesn’t he? Matthew McConaughey’s done enough work in the genre — rom-coms almost ruined his career, after all — to know how the story always goes, and he said it’s that last part, the boy-chases-girl part, where he’s had to fight for his character. He continued:
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My challenge for my role as the male was always in the third act, when the boy comes back to girl, man comes back to woman. It was always written like [the man] comes back on two knees weeping. ‘Take me back, or I am nothing.’ And I immediately went, ‘What girl wants that guy?’And they were like, ‘Oh, you’re afraid to be vulnerable.’ I said, ‘No, no, no. I’m not talking about that.’ I said, ‘Hang on a minute. I want to show up with some dignity.’
My god, he’s so right. Women don’t want the sniveling “I’m nothing without you” guy. They want the man who’s secure enough and mature enough to take accountability for his mistakes. Matthew McConaughey said rather than come crawling back, he wants to apologize and let his woman know that what they have is worth fighting for. He continued:
It was always a battle for me and one that I think I fought pretty well. It was the part of the rom-coms of why, to this day – after 55 films and a lot of dramas – when people go, ‘What were the hardest roles?’ Not Dallas Buyers Club, losing 55 pounds. That made sense. What was hard was fighting the battles for the third acts of those rom-coms. That’s the hardest work I’ve ever done on film.
You have to hand it to Matthew McConaughey, and not for his unbelievable Dallas Buyers Club diet (which apparently involved no exercise and as much wine as he wanted — where is the justice?!). Give this man credit, because he didn’t just show up and read the lines he was given. He took the script and helped to make his character into a man that the predominantly female audience would feel more connected to.
His take on romantic-comedies makes me wish he’d return to the genre, and I’m holding out hope that maybe someday he will. For now, however, fans can see him in The Rivals of Amziah King, a neo-Western crime thriller, as well as Brothers in which he and Woody Harrelson play fictional (and possibly related) versions of themselves. The comedy is set to premiere on the 2026 TV schedule later this month and can be streamed with an Apple TV subscription.