His Time to Kill
It took only three years for a good ol’ boy from Uvalde to become Hollywood’s hottest leading man? Even Matthew McConaughey can’t believe it.
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Next door, a much larger party fills the beach—it’s Eastern Orthodox Easter, and McConaughey’s Greek neighbor has roasted a lamb and invited a few hundred close friends. Renée Zellweger, herself a Texas actress with an imminent career-making role opposite Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire , drops by. At first she mistakes the next-door scene for McConaughey’s house, and she tells him she feared he had “gone Hollywood” on her.
The gang makes its way to the beach, but there’s a problem—being in a semi-public place with Sandra Bullock. People with cameras automatically gravitate to the space around her. This is how Hard Copy gets those casual shots of “partying” celebrities. McConaughey’s friends close ranks around Bullock, getting between her and the lenses. Nobody wants to take a picture of Matthew.
AUSTIN’S HYATT REGENCY will never be confused with Schwab’s drugstore, but that’s where Matthew McConaughey had his Lana Turner experience—where he was touched by the hand of celluloid fate. In the spring of 1992 the UT film student was in the hotel bar with his girlfriend when the bartender pointed out a gentleman who was apparently in the movie business. McConaughey introduced himself to Don Phillips, and over several hours and several drinks the two men talked film and golf, until they became so loud that the Hyatt’s management bid them a forceful farewell.
Back at McConaughey’s house, Phillips revealed his bona fides: He was a casting director, and having put unproven talents like Sean Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Forest Whitaker in Fast Times at Ridgemont High a decade before, he was now rounding up prospects for Linklater’s similarly subversive seventies high school comedy, Dazed and Confused. He thought McConaughey would be a good fit for Wooderson, the mustachioed, bleached-blond relic who can’t let go of high school good times—or high school girls. Linklater’s improvisational style allowed his young cast room to roam, and McConaughey’s small role evolved into a memorably hilarious part with screen time right up to the final scene.
Suddenly, acting seemed like a logical pursuit, but first McConaughey finished film school—his UT diploma hangs in a massive frame above the fireplace in his upstairs bedroom—and shot a documentary, Chicano Chariots, about lowrider car culture in Texas. With Phillips’ encouragement, he was headed for Hollywood, but first he read for a small part in the still-unreleased Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He didn’t get it. Instead, writer-director Kim Henkel offered him the villainous lead role, opposite Renée Zellweger.
In August 1993, McConaughey arrived in Los Angeles, still on a roll. The William Morris Agency took him on as a client, and his first audition landed him the most significant male part in the “woman’s picture” Boys on the Side, which won him recognition beyond Dazed and Confused. But then the fairy tale took an intermission. McConaughey felt his auditions were sluggish and passive, and he lost out on hot parts in The Quick and the Dead, Assassins, and The Great White Hype. So he went back to his original love, directing. He put together a twenty-minute short called The Rebel, a comedy about a guy who thinks life on the edge means taking eleven items through the supermarket express checkout.
“That was the best thing I ever did for my acting,” he says. “Having a thing on the side that I really had a lot of pride in helped me a lot.” Possibilities began to open up, but aside from a couple of small roles—most notably his crucial part in John Sayles’s Lone Star, which critics have already placed next to Giant and The Last Picture Show as a grand, archetypal Texas movie—nothing he was excited about. Looking back, he gratefully notes that anything he might have done at the time would have interfered with his availability for A Time to Kill.
A Time to Kill was being made by the same production company and studio (Regency and Warner Bros.) that did Boys on the Side, and director Joel Schumacher was aware of McConaughey’s work. In April 1995 McConaughey went to see Schumacher on the set of Batman Forever, which Schumacher was directing, and talked to him about a supporting part in A Time to Kill eventually taken on by Kiefer Sutherland; but in reading the book, McConaughey had taken a liking to Grisham’s semiautobiographical hero, so while visiting with Schumacher, he took his shot.
“I’d heard Brad Pitt was playing the part, so I said, ‘Is Brad playing Jake?’ and Joel said, ‘No, do you think he should?’” McConaughey recalls. “And I go, ‘No, I think I should,’ and he and I looked at each other, just started smiling, and he said, ‘You know, you’d be a great Jake, but there’s no way the studio is gonna go for it.’ We laughed, and that was kinda it.”
Schumacher says he liked McConaughey for the lead all along, but this was a John Grisham movie—Tom! Julia! Denzel! Tommy Lee!—so an established star seemed inevitable. But he couldn’t cast the part without John Grisham’s say-so. Grisham, who still considers his 1989 debut novel to be his best work, refused to sell the movie rights until he got a director he liked—Schumacher’s The Client was the only adaptation he enjoyed—and cast approval. For a year, the two men hadn’t been able to settle on anyone, so Schumacher told Grisham he had a dark horse. “I knew you were hiding something!” Schumacher remembers the novelist saying. “You brought up all these names of all these terrible actors I hate because you had a secret casting surprise for me!”
Schumacher put together a screen test for McConaughey and in May summoned him to California from the set of Lone Star in Eagle Pass. McConaughey did his scenes on a makeshift set with a small crew. A few days later in Virginia, John Grisham and his wife watched this anonymous performer deliver the climactic courtroom summation. Then they watched it again.
Warner Bros. was so relieved that their two artists had finally agreed on something that the studio didn’t raise any objections. McConaughey has his own theories on that one. “There are a lot of things that happened that allowed me to get in there,” he says. Namely, the built-in draw of Grisham and the newfound power of Bullock, whose While You Were Sleeping made her one of those rare female leads who could “open” a movie by herself. The rest of the supporting cast is made up of well-liked, high-intensity actors, including Samuel L. Jackson, Donald and Kiefer Sutherland, and Academy award winners Kevin Spacey and Brenda Fricker. “The movie is not on my shoulders,” says McConaughey, who was paid $200,000 for his part.
He was back to work in Eagle Pass when he heard the news. “I get the call and it’s Joel and John Grisham,” he remembers. “Grisham goes, ‘Matthew, let’s make a movie together.’ I was out of my head. I coughed a lot. I said ‘F yeah!’ about thirty times.” He immediately sought out Lone Star’s still photographer: “I said, ‘Take some pictures of me right now. I’m glowing and I have a good reason to be glowing and I want to see what I look like.’ So he took some shots, and I’ve seen ’em and my cheeks are hot. I’m just electric.”
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