Matthew McConaughey has played his fair share of iconic characters, from charming-sleazy stoner David Wooderson in Dazed and Confused to the tortured Detective Rust Cohle in True Detective. But the Texas-born actor says his latest role as a big-dreaming mineral prospector in the upcoming film Gold was by far his favorite.
Gold, which hits theaters Jan. 27, follows prospector Kenny Wells as he tries to keep the family business afloat. After the market crashes in the mid-1980s, Wells is forced to move his company from an office to a bar, where he and his cohorts spend countless hours puffing cigarettes, downing whiskey and looking for their next deal. Wells' "delusional optimism," as McConaughey calls it, leads him to celebrity geologist Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez) and together they take a leap of faith to Indonesia in hopes of hitting a literal gold mine.
The movie is loosely based on the true story of Canadian company Bre-X Minerals, which infamously scammed the industry for $6 billion by claiming it had found possibly the largest gold haul in history. Like the real events, the expedition for Gold is marred by fraud, but not before the leading duo squeezes its high-rolling benefactors for all they've got.
But the movie isn't about greed, McConaughey is quick to note. It's about gold.
"Gold is the pursuit of the dream. Gold is pulling it off, the getting away with it," he says. "Gold is the chase more than the capture."
That's why McConaughey loved playing Kenny Wells, who is both the most determined and least likely person to make it happen. Characters like Wells are usually "the sidekick of the sidekick" in movies, McCounaughey says, because their stories aren't glamorous. But they are perhaps more human than most.
"The guy is at the bottom of the barrel like so many scrappers and hustlers out there who were never gonna get a ticket to the American Dream, never," McConaughey says. "So they gotta make their own way."
McConaughey learned what he could from studying David Walsh, the late president of Bre-X whose penchants for smoking and drinking were portrayed in the movie. To fill in the remaining narrative, McConaughey looked to scrappers and hustlers in his own life, including his father, a pipe and oil salesman from Longview. McConaughey recounts accompanying his father to find people that owed him money. Showing up with a 12 year old, he says, would shame these people into paying him. Other times, his dad would roll up behind abandoned shopping malls to buy hot watches or jewelry. He even invested in a diamond mine in Ecuador.
"There were no diamonds in that mine," McConaughey says, "but dad got to go over there, hack his way through the jungle, go down to the mine and dream about the possibilities. That was the fun for him."
That journey sounds almost identical to one Kenny Wells takes in the movie, I mention.
"Yeah," McConaughey says, "very, very similar."
Developing Kenny Wells' persona also meant McConaughey had to adapt physically to the role. The actor, who weighed just 135 pounds for his role in Dallas Buyers Club, gained 47 extra by way of cheeseburgers and beer to embody his character in Gold. (Viewers get a bare, backside look at his transformation during one scene in the movie.)
In all, McConaughey spent about five years working on this movie, during half of which he personally searched the right director for the screenplay. But he says it was all worth it for the role of a lifetime.
"The appetite. How much of a consumer of life this guy is. The resilience, the endurance, the balls, the willpower, the purity of heart to not break the chain of the company that his grandfather created by any means necessary," McConaughey says. "That's a pure, pure individual."
