Matthew McConaughey Drops Massive 'Yellowstone' Announcement After 3-Year Hiatus From Acting
Matthew McConaughey has been largely on vacation for the past three years — one year for each iconic “all right” the actor has come to be known for — but that’s apparently coming to an end.
“The last few years I had a really wonderful time getting rid of a lot of those filters that come with acting,” he told the Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, the hosts of “Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard,” a podcast that regularly interviews celebrities like McConaughey.
The 53-year-old actor sounded more than ready to take a break from his extended break.
“To go have some structure like, ‘I got a call time, I’ve got lines, I’ve got scenes, I’ve got a character’; that sounds like a vacation right now to me,” he said.
And if you’re going to return to acting, it would be hard to find a more successful franchise to do it with than “Yellowstone,” which McConaughey said he’d be joining this season.
“Yellowstone,” after five successful seasons, has already spun off two other shows in the same universe: “1883” and “1923,” the latter of which stars heavy hitters Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren.
There’s also “6666,” another prequel, due out next year, which will make four entries in what some are already calling the “Taylorverse,” after show creator Taylor Sheridan.
McConaughey didn’t say which show he’d be joining, but it’s easy to imagine him making any of them more successful than they would have been without the likable star.
“I am now becoming more interested in actually going to play another character in a movie or a TV show because all of the last four years of culminating and writing and getting these things together and getting more into some public service,” McConaughey said.
“The idea of going to act in the right role or the right movie, film or series right now, I’ll be a different or improved actor in my own right after these last three years.”
Of course, McConaughey hasn’t been completely absent from the entertainment industry over the past three years.
“His last role was in Guy Ritchie’s 2019 movie ‘The Gentlemen,'” the New York Post noted. “Since then, he’s been a voice actor on a few series, such as ‘Agent Elvis’ on Netflix.”
McConaughey has spent most of the past three years concentrating on writing and promoting “Greenlights,” a memoir released in 2020, however.
Rumored tension between Sheridan and “Yellowstone” star Kevin Costner has led some to speculate that fans won’t see a sixth season of the hit show; if Costner were to exit, McConaughey could rescue it from possible cancellation.
“We have no news to report,” a Paramount spokesman told the Post, however. “Kevin Costner is a big part of ‘Yellowstone,’ and we hope that’s the case for a long time to come.”
In February, Deadline reported that Sheridan was “moving to end” the show, and that McConaughey would be joining the Taylorverse in a new “potential franchise extension.”
Will that be the aforementioned “6666,” a re-imagined version of “Yellowstone” itself, or some so-far unknown third option?
At this point, your guess is as good as ours. It may, in fact, be as good as theirs.
Don’t touch that dial.
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