“Any character that I play, I always ask, ‘What’s their monologue?’” Matthew McConaughey says. “Whether it’s subtext or whether it’s spoken, you gotta have your monologue before you can say your dialogue.”
And dialogue is something that McConaughey, with a Southern drawl that veers between seductive and evangelical, excels at delivering. But when he read the script for his new film, “The Lost Bus,” McConaughey wasn’t sure it was for him. As a fan of “Captain Phillips” and “United 93,” he wanted to work with director Paul Greengrass, and the topic, a true story about a bus driver named Kevin McKay who rescued 22 children during the 2018 Camp Fire, was the kind of propulsive adventure that he loves. But there was nothing for McConaughey to access — no inner monologue to explain what turned Kevin from an ordinary guy into an extraordinary hero.
After talking with Greengrass, McConaughey realized he’d been wrong. There was a wounded heart to Kevin, who’s grieving the death of his father and struggling to connect with his teenage son, that the actor understood.
“There was a line that Paul came up with that said it all to me,” McConaughey remembers. “It’s toward the end, where Kevin says, ‘I was too late as a son and now I’m too late as a father,’ and boom, I got it.”
McConaughey may have had doubts at first, but Greengrass felt the actor was the only big star who could believably play a man hustling to stay afloat and keep his family together.
“Matthew comes from a bluecollar background,” Greengrass says. “He understands what it means to work a job and still not be able to make ends meet.”
“The Lost Bus” is being released at a time when ecological catastrophes are commonplace. As Greengrass was editing the picture, wildfires tore through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena in Southern California, killing residents and destroying homes.
“I’d spent months creating these images on-screen; to see them playing out in a community I know was shocking,” Greengrass says. “But it’s part of our world now. Places like France, Spain and Greece are having their worst forest fires in 100 years.”
McConaughey and Greengrass aren’t just interested in depicting the impact of a warming planet; they also want to show how regular people can meet devastating challenges.
“Kevin is just going through the ho-hum of a regular day when everything is interrupted by this crisis,” McConaughey says. “He didn’t want to answer the call to pick up those kids. But there was no one else on that side of town, so he took the call and it was his salvation.”
“The Lost Bus,” premiering at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 5, marks a return to the big screen for McConaughey, who took a six-year break, during which he wrote a memoir. He thinks the time away made him a better actor.
“Real life inspires me,” he says. “Art emulates life more than it does the other way around. So real drama, real responsibilities, real comedy, real pain, real joy, real victory, real failure fills my tank and helps me create better characters.”
As he weighs what to do next, McConaughey is thrilled his friend Nicolas Cage will headline the fifth season of “True Detective,” the HBO show that kicked off the McConaissance of the early 2010s. “He’s a great actor, and I’d like to see him in that world,” he says.
McConaughey says he’s open to reprising his role as philosophizing detective Rust Cohle if the opportunity arises.
“We nailed that first season,” he says. “But if it’s a script like that first one, with that fire and originality, I’d do it. And you talk about monologues. Well, Rust Cohle had a monologue. He talked about everything that was inside him, and he didn’t care if you were listening or not. There’s freedom in that.”
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