Matthew McConaughey has opened up about the career break he took between 2009 and 2011, and how things got to that point for him.
"The devil's in the infinite yeses. Not the nos," he explained during a conversation with tennis pro Nick Kyrgios. "'No' is just as important, if not more important. Especially if you have some level of success and access."
In particular, the actor felt the need to say "no" when making rom-com after rom-com in the 2000s was no longer good enough for him.
"I've had times in my life where I said, 'Nope. Full stop, no,'" he continued. "When I was rolling in the rom-coms, and I was 'the rom-com dude.' That was my lane, and I liked that lane. That lane paid well and it was working. But the lane was—I was so strong in that lane that anything outside that lane, dramas and everything that I wanted to do, were like, 'No, no, no, no, McConaughey.' Hollywood said, 'No, no, no, you stay there.'"
The How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days star explained that that wasn't what the wanted for his life anymore, and that he told his wife Camila Alves McConaughey that at the time.
"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 talked to my—made a pact with my wife, and said, 'I'm not going back to work unless I get offered roles I wanna do,'" he revealed.
When Kyrgios pointed out that the actor had an "epic return" circa 2011, McConaughey explained that his career break had cost him his sense of purpose.
"That two years was wobbly, bro," he said. "That bottle of my favorite juice started looking good earlier in the day. Luckily, Camila got pregnant with our first child, so there was purpose coming to look forward to, but I was still like, 'Man's gotta work.' I got a craft, what do I do? And making chimes and working in the garden wasn't cutting it."
The spouses share children Levi, 16, Vida, 14, and Livingston, 11.
In the end, the actor was offered a movie that was more so what he wanted to do but not quite right, and he turned down their $14.5-million offer. This, he believes, caused the industry to understand that he was "not bluffing."
He said, "I think that's what made Hollywood go, 'You know what, he's now a new novel idea. He's a new, bright idea.'"
When McConaughey was offered projects such as Mud and True Detective, he knew it was right. "When those offers came, I was salivating," he told Kyrgios. "I went back to back to back and worked as much as I could and loved it and felt every bit of it."
