Matthew McConaughey has been open, in recent years, about his desires to take a break from acting. (Before releasing The Lost Busand The Rivals Of Amziah Kingover the last year, it had been more than half a decade since he’d last taken on a non-voice role.) Might we suggest, then, a career pivot? Because if his recent trip to the Criterion Closet is any indication, the man would make one hell of a pretty alright (alright, etc.) performer in the extremely lucrative ASMR videos space.
This isn’t a revelation, exactly: McConaughey’s been mining the tingles for years, through soft-spoken performances in things like Lincoln commercials that predicted whole vast genres of online woolgathering. But he really leans into it during his time in the Closet, softly narrating the act of taking a very sizeable haul of films that range from his own work—there’s no escaping Dazed And Confused—to a blend of more artistically recognized movies, plus stuff his mom loves. (The latter courtesy of a great early Tootsie snag.) Hell, he even does the little finger taps on the shelves and finishes with a little kiss; title the video “Talking about why I love Thelma & Louise for five minutes while rustling around in my closet,” carefully scan it for anything that might give YouTube’s militant demonetization squads pause, and you’re on the way to god knows how many millions of views.
Even beyond the low, soothing sounds of DazedMatthew420, though, the video is also a great example of why the best Closet videos work: A sort of film-prompted self-interview spun out of a massive series of potential leaping-off points. (There is something so essentially McConaughey about the man sidetracking himself with the story of getting the call to star in A Time To Kill: “I took off running into the desert until I broke a sweat. Dropped down on both knees and put up a hand to shake the moon’s hands and say ‘Thank you.'” Hell yeah, you did, bud!)
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