Matthew McConaughey in a scene from The Lost Bus, which premieres at TIFF.Apple TV+/Supplied
No one sweats on-screen quite like Matthew McConaughey.
Whether he is commanding a sweltering southern courtroom in A Time to Kill, hunting down a backwoods Louisiana killer in True Detective or dodging gosh-dang dragons in Reign of Fire, McConaughey is a sweater par excellence, the actor’s deeply drenched visage underlining his commitment to getting under a character’s skin, and staying there.
But McConaughey, who has been largely absent from the screen for the past several years, might deliver his sweatiest – and most intense – performance yet with director Paul Greengrass’s new white-knuckle thriller, The Lost Bus.
TIFF 2025: The 15 buzziest movies you can’t miss at this year’s Toronto film festival
Adapted from Lizzie Johnson’s non-fiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, the film stars McConaughey as a real-life school bus driver named Kevin McKay who, in the midst of the deadliest wildfire in California history in 2018, was entrusted with ferrying 22 children through a raging inferno. Playing like a refashioning on Greengrass’s own 2013 hit Captain Phillips, The Lost Bus throws the one-time McConnaissance poster boy into the role of reluctant working-class hero, a man unsure whether he’s fit to save himself, let alone anybody else.
Ahead of the film’s world premiere at TIFF on Sept. 5 – as well as the Sept. 16 release of his new book Poems & Prayers – McConaughey sat down for an in-depth conversation with The Globe and Mail about life, death and sweat.
Watching The Lost Bus just a few months removed from L.A.’s deadly wildfires was quite an experience. I imagine you know people who were affected by that situation. How does it feel to be bringing this film into the world now, while the wounds are still healing?
It’s an odd feeling, because it’s two tragic things, and one was in the past. Retelling that story, even without the latest California wildfires or the next one that’ll happen, was touchy subject matter. I do know a lot of people who were displaced, yeah. Is that going to hit home to them differently? Obviously. How does that feel? Well, I’m interested to see what the reaction is. It will seem more urgent. I’m standing by.
Your character in the film, I feel you’re familiar with this kind of guy. You’ve played men like Kevin before: struggling, rural, just trying to hold it down. What attracts you to such characters?
I am drawn to those outcasts. They are sort of folk heroes and anti-heroes at the same time. There’s a lot of men in situations like Kevin. The American Dream or their version of it didn’t work out, and now they’re looking over their shoulders. This is a guy with no follow-through. I know a lot of these people, and they’re romantic in that sense. But again, they don’t stick with it until they’re forced to. So Kevin has a part-time job, and he’s got nothing else on his mind than going back to get his son as the fire starts. And then a call comes in, and there are 22 stranded kids who need help. Anybody got a bus on that side of town? Are you kidding me? God, what kind of dirty trick is this?! Somebody else, please, pick up. But he takes the call.
Now, have you ever been in that situation to get that call-from-God moment and you also went, “Please let someone else pick it up.”
Not in such a hairpin, short amount of time. The moments here are really compressed. And that was the most challenging sequence of scenes for me, because they’re major leaps for Kevin. I don’t think I’ve had anything myself that urgently put me into action. I remember punches to the gut, crumbling to my knees and collapsing on the linoleum floor when I heard about the death of my father, or my brother’s wife. They were more gut blows than something that put me into action, it’s different. I’m sure I’ve been in some positions where I made a bold decision and then quickly had to adapt. Probably in the wild. Hiking through Mali, Africa, this 14-day hike and then getting challenged by a champion wrestler in a village. Yeah. In that moment, my heart started beating up. But that was more adrenalin. Not a heroic act.
That hairpin moment that Kevin goes through – should he save his own son or these kids? – I was wondering how much you built that moment using the fact that your own son, Levi, is acting here as your on-screen kid. And your real mom, Kay, is playing Kevin’s mother. Is that an accelerant for you, as an actor, to get to the place you need to be?
It definitely helped, because when Kevin is pulled over on the side of the road and his ex-wife is talking to him about getting his life together and following through with his son, well, I’m stopped there and whatever is happening to me on the screen, I’m thinking about when and if I ever left my own children stranded, where they’re screaming for me and I can’t hear them. When was I late? Me, Matthew. When did I not hear them? When did I sleep through it? When did I hear it and say, “ah, lay down, it’ll stop in a minute.” It’s scary. So that’s what I’m thinking about. It did help.
The way Paul shot this film, to achieve a certain kind of lighting, he needed you and your co-star America Ferrera to only have three takes of a scene, meaning that you had to go for broke each time and nail it. Do you enjoy that kind of high-stress responsibility?
Dude, I loved it. I sure as hell don’t always get it on the first take, but I love a one-take mentality. I love the feeling of the pressure being on. I came to work at 10 in the morning, and we had a huge lot where the action scenes were shot. So we rehearse. I get on the bus, a telephone pole falls! Whoa, what’s that? Bam! Explosion and fire over there! Back up, whoa! We’d get out and I walk it through with the stunt co-ordinators. It’s like a dance, right? Boom, veer left! Swerve! Take a left, screeeeech! Choreograph it. Paul brought together pros.
I want to talk about your process regarding a different project, Poems & Prayers. For your first book, the memoir Greenlights, you took 52 days of solitary confinement to write that. What was it like this time around?
I hadn’t quite landed on something that I felt was kindred to Greenlights but still had enough of its own identity that I was ready to put it out. I found myself feeling doubtful, cynical, looking around at reality and going, “I’m not seeing much to believe in.” Not as much as I wanted to. And it scared me. And then I got pissed off. I was like, “whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on, bud. We shook hands a long time ago and we agreed, cynicism is one of the worst diseases a man can choose in life.” So I was writing what I was enjoying: poems and lyrics and dreams and prayers. It was an escape, a way to hang on to ideals. That’s where my head and heart are going right now. So that’s where it came from, and it was to stave off my own senses of doubt and disbelief.
And what did you find there?
Well, I found that I had written a bunch of poems, way back since I was 18 years old. And you could tell I had a thesaurus. “Infallibly.” I didn’t know what it meant then, because I don’t even know now. But to see the poems and stuff that I left was very raw, because that’s beautiful. There’s an 18-year-old striving to make sense of the audacities of the world. And then I started to notice, “hey, my poems are my prayers.” What’s the difference? Poetry, everyone has a better idea how to talk about it. But prayers? I have a lot of friends who are agnostic, but they have no trouble saying thank you for this, that or the other. So that can be a prayer. There really ain’t no rules. You get quiet, start there, and if you’re not sure what’s next, just think of something that you’re thankful for. It’s paying attention to ourselves.
The Lost Bus premieres at TIFF on Sept. 5 (tiff.net), before opening in select theatres Sept. 19 and streaming on Apple TV+ starting Oct. 3. Poems & Prayers will be published Sept. 16.
This interview has been condensed and edited.