Matthew McConaughey may be the most diverse actors in modern day film.
We’ve seen him play a brand new college football coach, a homeless fugitive, a cowboy with AIDs, a Wall Street tycoon, an attorney, a stripper, and so much more.
The guy can do it all.
But speaking of an attorney, I’m referring to one of McConaughey’s most iconic movies to date, The Lincoln Lawyer.
In the movie, he typically defends petty criminals out of his Lincoln sedan, until his whole world changes when he has to defend a Beverly Hills playboy who has been accused of attempted murder.
It’s a damn good movie and a personal favorite of mine, and I’d highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t yet.
With that being said, McConaughey himself took to social media to discuss his role in The Lincoln Lawyer, and it was really the first movie that got him out of the rom com chapter of his career:
“‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ was really the first film that I did when I started my un-branding phase probably 13 years ago.
I’d been on a long strain of romantic comedies and action comedies, and while I enjoyed doing them, I always wanted to do different things and those different things were not coming my way.”
He noted that it was during his transition period from being a rom-com and action actor, to focusing more on dramas:
So I had a phase, I don’t know if you remember, where I was sort of gone. You didn’t see me in a magazine, you didn’t see me online, you didn’t see me at all for about two years. Well I was in Austin at my home, raising my first son Levi with my wife Camilla, and really holding out so those roles could come my way.
‘Lincoln Lawyer’ was something I’d been around and been attached to for years, but nobody really wanted to make it with me. It was really the first one coming out of my un-branding phase and into my re-branding phase, which led to a string of all these dramas that I’ve done over the last 12 years, ‘Lincoln Lawyer’ was the first one.
He also added that he always had ambitions of being an attorney growing up, inspiring him to want to do The Lincoln Lawyer:
“I was raised believing I was gonna be a lawyer, since I was 12. Even before I was 12, my parents were like ‘You’re a great debater… You need to be a lawyer.’ Well that turned into ‘No, you really should be a lawyer, you’re great at breaking down cases and seeing both sides of the story, and debating both sides of the story.’
Well I was headed to college to be a defense attorney, and I didn’t do that thankfully. I went to film school and became an actor, so I can play one on TV or in a screen near you, like I did in ‘Lincoln Lawyer,’ and I’d played a defense attorney in ‘A Time to Kill,’ I played a defense attorney in ‘Amistad,’ but the first time I’d ever played a prosecutor was in ‘Lincoln Lawyer.’
And in order to be the best defense attorney he could be, he discussed how studying the past law movies he played in molded him into a great role as a prosecutor:
Part of playing a good defense attorney, I want to understand where the prosecutors are coming from. I want to understand a prosecutors argument is, even better than my own.
So, I really studied the prosecutors case in ‘Amistad’ and ‘A Time to Kill,’ so in ‘Lincoln Lawyer’ I studied what the defense would be. Anticipate what the defense’s argument is, and therefore be able to prosecute better.”
Trace Adkins also played a biker in it:
