Academy Award for Best Actor

2013

Matthew McConaughey

as

Ron Woodroof

Dallas Buyers Club

Matthew David McConaughey (/məˈkɒnəheɪ/; born November 4, 1969) is an American actor and producer. He first gained notice for his breakout role in the coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confused (1993), and went on to appear in films such as the slasher Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994), the legal thriller A Time to Kill (1996), Steven Spielberg's historical drama Amistad (1997), the science fiction drama Contact (1997), the comedy EDtv (1999) and the war film U-571 (2000).

In the 2000s, he became best known for starring in romantic comedies, including The Wedding Planner (2001), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), Failure to Launch (2006), Fool's Gold (2008) and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009). Since 2010 he has moved away from romantic comedies and has had roles in the films The Lincoln Lawyer (2011), Bernie (2011), Killer Joe (2011), The Paperboy (2012), Mud (2012), Magic Mike (2012), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Interstellar (2014). He is generally considered to be one of the best actors of this generation and some film critics and journalists even refer to this era of film as the 'McConaissance'.

McConaughey achieved much success in 2013 for portraying a cowboy diagnosed with AIDS in the biographical film Dallas Buyers Club, which earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, among other awards and nominations. In 2014, he also starred as Rust Cohle in the acclaimed HBO crime anthology series True Detective, for which he won a Critics' Choice Award and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.