8 Actors Who Switched It Up Perfectly

Matthew McConaughey started out playing several serious roles in his career, such as in Amistad and Contact. However, he then moved into the romantic comedy scene of the late '90s and early noughties, and that seemed to be that.

Not so: in the early 2010s, McConaughey once again started to appear in more and more drama films. He had a brilliant turn as an assassin cop in Killer Joe, as well as the prosecutor in black-comedy biographical movie Bernie.

These were just pre-cursors though, to the brilliant, Jeff Nichols' directed Mud. In Mud, McConaughey plays the titular character, a vagabond who comes back to his hometown to meet the love of his life.

The depth and almost animalistic nature that McConaughey imbues Mud with is brilliance wrapped in shabby clothes; there are few performances that go unnoticed in the career of somebody like Matthew McConaughey but this is certainly one of them. Most will attribute his best performance to his Oscar-winning film Dallas Buyers Club, but for those in the know, Mud is where McConaughey has done his best work.

Since Mud, McConaughey has taken more serious roles than he ever had at other times in his career, with Interstellar and a cameo in The Wolf Of Wall Street being real highlights.