Heartbreakers

Interview, August, 1996 by Graham Fuller

The great movie stars who emerged in the 1950s were the last of a breed that had originated a generation before with the beginning of the talkies. It's not indulging in nostalgia or the fallacy of "how things used to be" to acknowledge that no galaxy of brilliant young actors from the '60s, '70s, '80s, or '90s has come along to rival the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Paul Newman.

Here, however, are an actor and an actress who perceptibly radiate the flavor of that '50s magic. Ashley Judd and Matthew McConaughey, who play a married couple in the recently released courtroom drama A Time to Kill, directed by Joel Schumacher, are, in their appeal and even occasionally in the sensibility of their performances, throwbacks to the era of films like Giant (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Hurl (1963).

We've thrilled about Judd ever since she appeared in Ruby in Paradise in 1993, and she's no stranger to the pages of this magazine.

Matthew McConaughey is a newly launched dream boat with a seductive courtliness and more than a touch of Paul Newman's insouciance. Yet, watching him in A Time to Kill, his vehicle to stardom, it's difficult not to think of Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Like Peck, McConaughey plays a Southern lawyer who has pledged to defend a black man in an atmosphere of white bigotry, with a young family that is suddenly vulnerable. But the similarities to Peck go beyond the plots of these films. There's a gravity and sincerity in McConaughey that we've learned to do without in this era of boy stars - it comes across most emphatically in his character's beautifully weighed summation, a clarion call against inhumanity. An actor lacking these qualities or looking for a chance to preen might have undercut A Time to Kill's antiracist urgency, but McConaughey carries the day, the movie, and the message. He seems to have arrived fully grown, a man. It's a feat that should carry him far.

Two young actors. Separate or together - what promise, what elegance, what earthiness. They are as reliable in their naturalness as the stars that come out every night - you can see that in these Bruce Weber photographs, and in the interviews that follow. No phony cool here, and no gloss, just a piercing immediacy.