Casting Matthew McConaughey For True Detective Was A Backbreaking Odyssey
As Woody Harrelson's character, Marty Hart, frequently observes in "True Detective" season 1, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) is a weird dude. Try to make polite small talk about what he thinks of his new detective posting and he's more likely to say something like "It's all one ghetto, man. A giant gutter in outer space" than "It's very nice, thank you for asking."
Finding an actor who can play a hard-bitten detective, a grieving father, an alcoholic who wanders on and off the wagon, and a free-wheeling nihilistic philosopher — all in one character — isn't easy. Not everyone can deliver lines like "Death created time to grow the things that it would kill" with a straight face. And "True Detective" creator Nic Pizzolatto had a very specific type of actor in mind for the character of Rust, not just in terms of style but in terms of physicality as well.
"[HBO] pushed quite a few actors on me, and I vetoed all of them," Pizzolatto recalled during a panel at the Austin Film Festival, attended by /Film's Ryan Scott:
"I don't want to say any names, but they were actors who ... I [was] 36, 37, so I guess they're guys about my age then, but they look like boys to me. They did not look masculine to me ... I was like, "No, we need men." And then I was even thinking like, 'God, what men do we have left? Do we have to go to Australia?' Because that's what it seemed everybody was doing."
'The most macho dude in the world'
According to the renowned Chinese military leader Li Shang, a man must be swift as the coursing river, with all the force of a great typhoon; he must have all the strength of a raging fire, yet also be as mysterious as the dark side of the moon. That's a pretty tall order. But Pizzolatto eventually found a man, and that man was Matthew McConaughey:
"I caught 'The Lincoln Lawyer' on TV and I was like, 'Oh yeah, that guy. He's a man.' I had always thought there was something really untapped in Matthew that I mostly got from two performances or three. One was 'Frailty,' the Bill Paxton film. One was a Bill Murray movie called 'Larger Than Life,' in which Matthew plays a methamphetamine addicted, long distance trucker named Tip Tucker. And then a dragon-fighting movie called 'Reign of Fire,' where Matthew plays the most macho dude in the world who jumps into a dragon's mouth swinging an ax..."
And so, "True Detective" had its Rust Cohle. Alright, alright, alright! Except everything wasn't alright. Just as Pizzolatto had rejected HBO's casting suggestions for the character, he now found his own casting recommendation being rejected.
"Every actor suggested for Cohle was an Ed Norton type," Pizzolatto explained, with Norton taking some collateral damage when he added, "As if in order to be an intellectual, you must be a physical weakling." The producers just couldn't tally the idea of a well-read detective with the kind of guy who leaps into dragons' mouths. In order to bag his man, Pizzolatto had to get creative.
A man with a plan
"True Detective" isn't a comedy, but Hart and Cohle do have a quietly comedic Odd Couple dynamic, and Marty Hart is the straight man. Many conversations between the cop partners are characterized by Cohle saying something dark and weird, and Hart telling him that if he can't say anything normal then he shouldn't say anything at all. After an early experience of being on the receiving end of one of Cohle's monologues, Hart decides: "Let's make the car a place of silent reflection from now on."
"The producers would not see Matthew as Cohle," said Pizzolatto. "They thought Matthew could be Hart, but no way could he be Cohle ... they liked the idea of submitting it to him for Hart." Rather than try to argue them into submission, the "True Detective" creator realized that there was an advantage to Hart being a less fun character to play:
"My belief, which I did not say, because these are the sorts of strategies you must employ when working with others, was, if Matthew reads this, I mean, any actor who reads this is going to want to play Cohle. They're not going to say, 'I really want that Hart role.' And I thought, If he reads this, he's going to want to play Cohle, and he's going to come back and his agent's going to say he wants to do it, but he wants to be the other guy. And that is exactly what happened."
McConaughey had previously been stuck in a bit of a rut of playing rom-com love interests, but his casting in "True Detective" coincided with a turning point in his career: from his Oscar-winning lead role in "Dallas Buyers Club" to his brief but delightfully weird appearance in "The Wolf of Wall Street." Human consciousness may have been a tragic misstep in evolution, but at least it gave us this.