Matthew McConaughey wishes he was more charming during his meeting with Oscar-winning filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen.
The actor said he believes he “failed” the interaction in an appearance on the Thursday episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “I remember an audition I failed,” he said. “Some meetings are auditions.” His meeting with the Coen brothers was an important one, he recalled, as he “revered” the Oscar-winning duo behind Fargo and No Country for Old Men.
“I always wanted to work with them,” he said, as he explained why he thinks their meetup is the reason why he still hasn’t. “I had a dinner set up with the Coen brothers and John Malkovich, just the four of us,” he added, setting the scene. “I had such a reverence and was so impressed that I was not involved in the conversation. And they knew each other well, and stories were going on.”
“And you know that time when you’re nervous, and you’re hearing stories going on, but then you kind of quit listening because you start thinking about… ‘I need to get a word in here somewhere. Maybe say something witty. Say something clever when I find the gap.’”
When the opportunity to join in on the conversation came, McConaughey said it did not go as well as he’d hoped.
“You get that gap, and you’re trying to hit it. But then you’re so happy that you got the gap, and now all the eyes are on you, and all of a sudden you start to stutter,” he recalled. “And you go like, ‘Oh, I lost my train of thought. I forgot.’ And you start to tell a joke, and you get the first act, second act, and you forget the punch line.”
He said he tried to “slough it off, like maybe they didn’t notice I missed the punch line,” but he still felt the weight of his missed moment.
“Everyone goes, ‘Oh, OK,’ and goes back to the conversation. It was one of those...” he said. Since then, he’s felt that the meeting led to him not being called up for roles he believes he would have been a good fit for.
The acclaimed writer-directors are known for their critically and commercially successful films, like 1996’s Fargo (1996), which won them an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay; 1998’s The Big Lebowski; and 2007’s No Country for Old Men, for which they won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars.
Malkovich starred in their 2008 film Burn After Reading—but McConaughey said he is still waiting by the phone.
“I left that meeting going, ‘Damn it, I blew it,” he recalled on Thursday. “And they never came to me for certain things that I was like, ‘I wish you would have come to me for that.’”
It’s not the first time the actor has had a blunder during an audition, as he’s recalled botching his bid for the lead role in Titanic.
Late producer Jon Landau recalled in his posthumous memoir that McConaughey read his lines with a drawl from his native Texas. When director James Cameron asked him to do it again without it, McConaughey replied, “No. That was pretty good. Thanks,” according to Landau. The role went to Leonardo DiCaprio—and the film won 11 Oscars and became one of the highest-grossing films of all time.
McConaughey said on Thursday that he thought the audition went really well at the time. “I did have a great, what I thought was a great audition...I walked out of there feeling like, ‘I think I got that role.’ And did not.”
He has no regrets about that one, however. “I’m pretty quick to go switch it off onto the next,” he said, “Hey, did all I could.”
“What’s tough is if I had gone in, had a s---ty audition and left going, ‘Ah, damn it. I could have…and then not gotten” the role, he said.
