Anne Marie Fox/European Pressphoto Agency  Matthew McConaughey has played darker roles in a spate of recent films including âThe Paperboy,â with Zac Efron. More Photos »  AT a certain point in the past decade — after the Jennifer Lopez movie and before the Jennifer Garner one, sometime between the two with Kate Hudson — Matthew McConaughey became a genre unto himself. For a while, it seemed, the makers of American romantic comedies were in the grips of repetition compulsion. Not only did many of these movies (“The Wedding Planner,” “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past,” “Failure to Launch”) have barely distinguishable posters and plots, Mr. McConaughey also served a constant function in them: Usually playing an upwardly mobile urban professional, he was a tanned emblem of a fantasy of modern masculinity, roguish but secretly sensitive, indecisive but (when push came to shove) true. His eye-crinkling grins and caddish smirks were not just the films’ principal weapons; often they were their very reasons for being.  By way of contrast, consider a few of Mr. McConaughey’s roles from this year alone. In Steven Soderbergh’s “Magic Mike” he struts away with the movie as an aging beefcake dancer turned sleazy M.C.-owner of a Tampa strip club. In William Friedkin’s Texas noir “Killer Joe,” due July 27, he has the title role of a sociopathic, Stetson-wearing cop and part-time hit man with a baroquely sadistic streak and a dead-eye stare behind his aviator shades. In Lee Daniels’s sweaty Southern Gothic melodrama “The Paperboy,” the talk of the Cannes Film Festival in May, he goes even further against the grain, playing a closeted gay reporter with a taste for rough sex and a raging death wish.  And that’s not all. In the recent true-crime tale “Bernie,” Mr. McConaughey burnished his character-actor credentials as a larger-than-life small-town prosecutor — and reunited with the director Richard Linklater, who gave him his big break two decades ago in “Dazed and Confused” (1993). Mr. McConaughey also proved his ability quietly to anchor a modest, old-fashioned movie, as a fugitive who befriends two Mississippi boys in “Mud,” a Huck Finnish slice of Americana from Jeff Nichols (“Take Shelter”), which also had its premiere at Cannes. Suffice to say these are all characters defined by rather more varied and interesting predicaments than an inability to commit, and for an actor whose filmography had come to resemble one interminable in-flight movie, this unfolding chapter — even if it means “humongous pay cuts,” in his words — counts as a major reinvention.  The difference between then and now is so pronounced that Mr. McConaughey acknowledged he had been hard-pressed to explain what happened. When a reporter approached him at the Greenwich Hotel in TriBeCa recently, he was lost in thought, scribbling on a notepad. Everyone who spoke about Mr. McConaughey for this article remarked on his penchant for preparation, and it turns out he was taking notes for the interview. “I’ve gone back and looked at some of my diaries to try and see, where was my head at?” he said.  As he tells it, there was no epiphany. “I didn’t just say, hey, line in the sand, I’m done with that, let’s begin with this,” he said. But there was a point a few years ago when he realized that the scripts coming his way, mostly romantic comedies and a few action adventures, were invariably “kind of boring.” The same offers kept rolling in — and no wonder, for most of Mr. McConaughey’s romcoms each took in more than $100 million worldwide — and he kept saying no.  It wasn’t long before Hollywood got the message. “In a wild cyclical way I started to attract these other things,” Mr. McConaughey said. The turning point was last year’s well-received thriller “The Lincoln Lawyer,” his first film after a two-year absence from movie screens. The part of a glib, swaggering lawyer was not a huge stretch, but he attacked it with relish, and it must have signaled a readiness for new challenges. In quick succession the directors — veterans and indie up-and-comers alike — came calling.  A midcareer swerve like Mr. McConaughey’s is hardly unprecedented: Tom Cruise mixed things up with left-field parts in “Magnolia” and “Tropic Thunder” (which also featured Mr. McConaughey), and John Travolta famously rebooted with “Pulp Fiction.” But few have pulled off so complete and sustained an overhaul.  “I’m having a lot of fun,” Mr. McConaughey said, noting that it has been a big year by any measure: he has five movies coming out, walked the Cannes red carpet twice in May, and married his longtime girlfriend, Camila Alves, last month. (They have two children and are expecting a third.) In conversation Mr. McConaughey was expansive and affable, even “mannerly,” a word he used several times. Generous with eye contact and back pats, he spoke in winding monologues and colorful analogies and was especially animated on the subject of his newfound freedom as an actor.  “There are zero shackles,” he said, noting what his recent characters have in common. “They definitely make up their own rules.” Much like Paul Newman’s antihero in “Hud,” a favorite of his, these are men who “walk in a straight line all the way to the end of the picture — no placation, no pandering,” he said.  Mr. McConaughey, 42, takes evident delight in tarnishing his golden-boy halo. “The hero, the white knight — he’s usually on the right side of morality,” he said. “But these guys I’ve been playing are more amoral.” There is no clearer example of this than the perverse “Killer Joe,” based on an early work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts. Mr. McConaughey admitted he was put off on a first read, but a discussion with Mr. Friedkin helped him see the pitch-black humor.  Mr. Friedkin said he was drawn to the Texas-born Mr. McConaughey in part for his familiarity with the East Texas region where the film is set. “He understood the geography in a way that contributes to the DNA of the character,” Mr. Friedkin said.  Mr. McConaughey said, “I know what that part of the country smells like.” He had a middle-class upbringing — his father ran an oil-pipe-supply business, his mother was a teacher — but he remembers the comportment of Texas tough guys, the collectors who worked for his father. They were “very stealth, quiet, soft-spoken,” he said, adding that some of those mannerisms might have seeped into his portrayal of the unnervingly composed Joe.
Matthew McConaughey has set aside his standing as a romantic-comedy lead to pursue a series of grittier and more complicated characters.