Jennifer Garner to Martha Stewart, why celebrities are “scared” of Matthew McConaughey’s method acting

Matthew McConaughey is known for his eye-catching performances and deep dedication to his roles. His creative method acting stance, however, has left a few of his colleagues and collaborators feeling uncomfortable.

From veteran actress Jennifer Garner to lifestyle mogul Martha Stewart, who have noted how disconcerting McConaughey's intense preparation and in-character behavior on set can be.

Martha Stewart, recently collaborated with McConaughey on a Super Bowl commercial. In a chat with actress Kate Hudson on The Martha Stewart Podcast, Stewart said she found McConaughey’s method of acting vaguely intimidating.

She described Matthew McConaughey’s experience in detail, explaining that he branched out into ten distinct characters and took around a quarter of an hour to get into each character.

"He got me scared actually, He had to play 10 characters, and he got into each character, it takes him about fifteen minutes. And he'd make weird sounds. He's grunting and breathing and jumping,"

Though at first shocked, Stewart praised McConaughey’s brilliance, saying,

"Boy, he’s fabulous."

As Stewart’s experience with McConaughey was confined to a commercial, Jennifer Garner on the other hand, actually spent a lot of time with him on the Dallas Buyers Club (2013) set.

McConaughey's extreme physical transformation for the role was coupled with his method acting, so the filming process was unique and weird, according to Garner.

"I knew he was in there. I chatted with him and was totally normal, and then I went into another room and went, 'Uhhhh' and collected myself because it gave me the shakes to see him look so ill,"

Naomi Watts' immersive preparation with Matthew McConaughey

Naomi Watts also experienced something interesting about Matthew McConaughey while they shot Sea of Trees (2015) together. Their characters were married in the film but had few on-screen interactions. As such, Watts preferred establishing their relationship through written correspondence.

McConaughey embraced the idea, replying to her first email to him, “Write at will. Love, Arthur." Throughout their preparation they traded messages in character, building a backstory through poetic and argumentative emails.

Naomi Watts explained how their emails helped them understand and establish a good history between the two characters. She said:

"We would talk about how things had gone wrong in [the marriage] in the voices of Arthur and [her character] Joan. So by the time we got to the set, we had a good month and a half of these letters.”

Matthew McConaughey offered insights into how he reads a script. He insisted on reading it at different times, in different places and with different feelings to understand every scene better.

In a video on YouTube, he offered a peek into his acting process, which he said involves spending great amounts of time contemplating and growing into his character.