Matthew McConaughey gets down and dirty Mud interview Steph Bunbury Back when Matthew McConaughey's career was climbing the first slope of the roller-coaster, critics ritually compared him to the young Paul Newman: he had the blond hair, the build, the boyish charm and, crucially, looked like someone who could do a real job. He was making interesting films: Dazed and Confused with fellow Texan Richard Linklater, John Sayles' Lone Star, the first of several earnest legal roles in A Time to Kill. I still have a lot of innocence in me. You grow older, you grow wiser, sometimes they say you should know better, but no. But then, somehow, McConaughey drifted into the sticky backwater of rom-coms. It is still hard to know why. Of course, he was definitively buff; for over a decade, the standing joke about the one-time pretender to Newman's majesty was that he could barely get through a scene without taking his shirt off. McConaughey himself always said he enjoyed these films. "I personally don't like to go see romantic comedies," he said once. But people do want to see them, and they seem to want to see me in them. Matthew McConaughey takes on a less glamorous role in Jeff Nichols' independent film Mud. They also paid. "Those films actually have me secure in my life, knowing I am secure and my kids are going to be secure and we've got a home - we have two homes, one in California and one in Texas," he says now. I never thought I'd be someone who had two homes. McConaughey never seemed at all acquisitive; he likes holidaying with a backpack and even spent some of his rom-com years living in a caravan, saying it was less bother than a house. Having that money has freed him, however, to get back on track. Five or six films ago, when he was spending some time at home with his wife Camila Alves and their children, he decided to "shake things up." I was saying: I want to find some characters that arrest me a little bit, that won't pander to convention ... so my next thought is 'Ooh, I want to figure out the mystery of this cat and come out the other side - and I don't know where the other side's gonna be.' And also I wanted to look for some real fresh-minded directors who had real points of view. In The Lincoln Lawyer (2011), he was able to return to his old legal stamping ground; in Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike (2012), playing the MC of a male strip show, he was able to turn the shirt joke to the character's advantage. But in his new film Mud, directed by Jeff Nichols, he plays his most demanding role yet: a drifter and dreamer who has taken refuge on an island in the Mississippi. Mud's only aspiration is to win back the girl he has idolised since childhood, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon); to this end, he enlists the help and friendship of a couple of local boys who find his hide-out, an old boat left stranded by floodwaters in the fork of a tree. Jeff Nichols made his mark a couple of years ago with his apocalyptic drama Take Shelter, but he had the idea for Mud around 1999, when he was at film school. Even then, he imagined McConaughey in the role. "I'd just seen Lone Star and I loved this guy," he says. I'd tell people then I'm working on an idea for Matthew McConaughey, and they would just kind of laugh at me. By the sort of strange coincidence Mud himself would see as a sign of fate, Nichols was and is a huge fan of Paul Newman; his favourite film is the prison drama Cool Hand Luke. Mud has developed a swell of critical support since it first screened in Cannes last year, but it eludes current categories in a way that makes it apparently hard to market. With its clear references to Huckleberry Finn, Mud the film is emotionally grounded in the romance of the fading South; Mud the character, meanwhile, is a cross between Robinson Crusoe and a fairytale prince and thus a little larger than any life we know. McConaughey knows where he's coming from, however. "I still have a lot of innocence in me," he says. You shouldn't learn better than to dream, he insists. You get hurt and you don't want to get hurt again, so it's survival. But I have always believed in that dream.