4. Matthew McConaughey - From Laconic Star To The Most In-Demand Serious Actor After DiCaprio
With his sleepy eyes and slow Southern drawl, it often appears that Matthew McConaughey is so laid back as to be practically horizontal. It also seemed that his laconic attitude may have passed over into a laziness of film choices with the once much touted actor apparently sleep-walking through his career. After winning a host of notices with a career making performance in A Time to Kill, McConaughey took a career path which compromised almost entirely of sub-standard rom coms. From How To Lose a Guy In Ten Days through to Fool's Gold and Failure To Launch, the Texan actor was receiving a pay check but barely flexing his acting muscles - instead he just displayed his actual muscles in chick flicks and let the money come in. Suddenly, when movie audiences had grown complacent with Matthew McConaughey's complacency, the actor made a couple of statement films back to back. In William Friedkin's vicious Killer Joe, McConaughey took the lead role as the violent, sexually charged titular character - a bounty hunter who revels in punishing debasement. It was a performance which jolted the audience and, in a better film, would have surely netted the actor a whole spate of awards. Following this up with Magic Mike, awards speculation flowed again as his character showed a vitality and spark which had been missing in McConaughey for years.
That he followed these movies up with Paperboy, and has an upcoming role in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, shows the actor has jettisoned his complacency in favour of much higher quality control, giving a career everyone assumed was dead to rapid rom-coms, an unexpected second life as one of the most exciting actors working today. Unbelievably to think only a few years ago but McConaughey's stock has risen so much he was actually the first star (and by all accounts has the leading role) in Christopher Nolan's next movie, Interstellar.