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Matthew McConaughey: Too sexy for his own good? | 134858__marshall_l
LEADING THE CHARGE In Marshall, McConaughey is the coach who brings back the school's football program after tragedy
We Are Marshall: Frank Masi

Just before lunchtime, McConaughey is kicking back with a little book of poetry, reading aloud: ''I met a man perched on a bottle/With a woman deep inside/Rising slowly up towards him/Floating on the tears he cried.'' The point of this recital (from Short Notes From the Long History of Happiness by Michael Leunig) is less the content of the poem itself — which is essentially about how chicks dig sensitive guys — than the explosion of synchronicity it set off in him last night, when he was reading it for the first time and a reggae artist named Mishka came on the radio singing about the exact same thing. ''All kinds of good stuff's been goin' on,'' he says with genuine delight, as if this coincidence is a sign from the universe that he's right on track, that every little thing's gonna be all right.

McConaughey has always taken his cues from connections seemingly pulled out of the ether. He peppers conversations with ''Just Keep Livin','' his personal mantra, as well as the name of his production company. The phrase was born of the collision of two seminal moments in his life: his movie debut in the 1993 high school comedy Dazed and Confused and his father's sudden death, of a heart attack, two weeks into shooting his role. It was a tossed-off, improvised line. But he soon realized that its carpe diem sentiment was exactly what he needed to move past his grief. ''I was dealing with my dad's death, thinking, 'How do I honor him and keep [his memory] alive? Just keep livin','' recalls the Texas native, who also found inspiration from his father, a gas station owner who was once drafted by the Green Bay Packers, on We Are Marshall. ''I got to know Pop better,'' he says, describing the three months he spent playing the do-gooder coach. ''I'm usually the guy who comes in and gets the girl. But this was a father of three with a wife. I'd been looking for that.''

The last time McConaughey played a true family man was a decade ago, in A Time to Kill, opposite Ashley Judd. But from the moment that movie hit pay dirt (ringing up $109 million), McConaughey felt a crushing pressure to rule the gigaplex. ''I had a dream I was floating down the Amazon feet first on my back in my birthday suit. There were pythons, alligators, and piranhas,'' recalls the actor, who knew his life was about to change forever. So he did what he regarded as the sensible thing: He strapped on his backpack and caught a flight to Peru, where he...floated down the river wild. ''A Time to Kill went ka-boom, God bless it.... When I got back, all of a sudden, I had to say no to 99 [offers] for the first time.''

He also said yes a lot, mostly to projects that seemed like slam dunks: Robert Zemeckis doing sci-fi, a Steven Spielberg historical epic, and a Ron Howard comedy. And while Contact came close to A Time to Kill with a $101 million gross, the one-two punch of 1997's Amistad ($44 million) and the following year's Newton Boys ($10 million) knocked him off the A list and into almost-famous purgatory. His performances got decent reviews, but Hollywood is often too quick to declare a star is born (think: Josh Lucas, Josh Hartnett), and McConaughey hadn't yet built the drawing power necessary to turn a tough-sell pre–Civil War film like Amistad into a mainstream hit. ''It sucked because I worked my butt off and I wanted people to connect with [the movies],'' says McConaughey. He seemed to have bottomed out in late 1999, when the police showed up in the middle of the night on a noise complaint and barged in to find the star banging bongos in the buff. ''Yeah, I was doin' what I was doin'. But it's not something any man should go to jail for,'' he says, still bristling at the memory of nine hours spent in the slammer for resisting arrest. ''People entered my house uninvited. I was pissed. I'm not a man who deserves to be in jail. It's not where I'm supposed to be.''

NEXT PAGE: On keeping his characters' ''balls''... and losing their shirts


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