Which Matthew McConaughey movie do fans mention to him most? He says it’s this one.

If you’ve spent any time yelling ‘alright, alright, alright’ at Matthew McConaughey across a pub, you might be gutted to hear you’re in the minority. Despite his decades bouncing between romcoms, drama, crime, and a bit of everything else, the film fans bring up the most with him isn’t even one of the so-called classics you might expect.

‘The people that come up to me, 95% of it is [to talk about] Interstellar.’

That’s McConaughey, speaking with Variety, and yes, he’s talking about Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s cosmic head-spinner, which apparently dominates his fan interactions even a decade after release. It’s not Dazed and Confused, it’s not The Wedding Planner, and it’s definitely not the one where he chases down aliens – it’s always that wormhole epic. I’d have thought more people would be on about the ‘alright, alright, alright’ line, but, by his own reckoning, that’s only about five percent. Turns out McConaughey walks through airports and gets asked about quantum physics more than prom night comedies.

If you genuinely lost the plot of Interstellar in a sea of time loops and tesseracts, here’s the short version: Earth’s knackered, crops are failing, and Michael Caine – never a bad sign, I’ll add – is playing Professor Brand, devising a plan to relocate everyone off the planet before we all suffocate or starve. McConaughey’s ex-NASA pilot, Cooper, gets tapped to fly a team through a wormhole to find humanity a new address out in the cosmos. It’s heavy on spectacle, a bit heavy on the melodrama, but it cleaned up both with critics and at the box office, snagging more than $681 million worldwide. The thing also spawned a small industry of fan theories and blokes in pubs insisting they ‘totally understood the ending’.

Interstellar turned 10, and yet fans reportedly still treat it like it launched yesterday.

All this means, if you’re stuck next to him at a bar, Interstellar is the hot topic — not relationship tips from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days or stock tips from The Wolf of Wall Street.

The new direction

McConaughey’s next major outing is The Rivals of Amziah King, and it’s about as far from black holes as you can get. This one sees him playing Amziah King, a honey-maker with a slightly ragged aura, deep in the backwoods of Oklahoma. His character gets roped back into the life of his former foster daughter, Kateri (played by Angelina LookingGlass), after her mum dies. The film played its first screening at South by Southwest 2025 but is only now landing in cinemas — starting with a small-scale run on 14 August before a general release on 21 August.

• The Rivals of Amziah King — McConaughey and Angelina LookingGlass headline
• Debuted at SXSW Film & TV Festival 2025
• Limited cinemas from 14 August, UK-wide from 21 August

The early word on this one? Our own Chris Bumbray calls it ‘one of the most unpredictable and wildly entertaining films I’ve seen in a while,’ which, for a drama about bees and Oklahoma foster care, is saying something. He also reckons it’s destined for the shortlist of best McConaughey performances, assuming people actually notice it exists when it finally drops in cinemas.