Matthew McConaughey on 'Killer Joe': The actor talks about violence, the NC-17 rating and a lack of 'safe'

matthew-killer-joe.JPGView full sizeMatthew McConaughey is icy cool as the hired hit man in "Killer Joe."

Matthew McConaughey has enjoyed a fabulous film year working with three of America's best directors.

He shined as the no-nonsense Texas lawman in Richard Linklater's "Bernie," with Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine, and buffed up to remove most of his clothing as the strip-club owner-performer in Steven Soderbergh's "Magic Mike" with Channing Tatum. But he has saved the best, or at least most startling, for last: the titular, intensely calm police detective who moonlights as a hit man in Billy Friedkin's violent and disturbing "Killer Joe."

After years of success as the affable, often shirtless, romantic-comedy dude, McConaughey has taken a sharp turn toward more dramatic roles.

"I was seeing a lot of scripts that I felt like I had done before," said the actor on the phone from Los Angeles. "I wanted to feel a little bit arrested, I wanted to feel challenged." But when he first received the "Killer Joe" script, he passed.

The film, which opens Friday at Cleveland's Capitol Theatre, is based on Tracy Letts' play. It follows the trailer-park machinations of Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) who plots to have his mother murdered so he can collect her life insurance. But Chris has no money to pay a contract killer. As collateral for the job, Detective Joe Cooper takes temporary possession of Chris' comely younger sister, Dottie (Juno Temple). Letts, who produced the play on various stages in the '90s and later won a Tony and Pulitzer Prize for "August: Osage County," adapted the screenplay himself. He then handed it over to Friedkin -- mastermind of such cinema classics as "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection" -- with whom he had worked previously on the disturbing Ashley Judd drama "Bug."

"I didn't get 'Killer Joe' at first," said McConaughey. "When I first read it, I was disgusted by it and threw it in the trash. A couple days later, I was talked into doing a re-read and look for the humor. As soon as the humor clicked for me, and Tracy's dialogue clicked for me, then I started to see the humanity in the characters."

Joe completely disrupts the lives of Chris and Dottie, as well as their divorced dad, Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) and his second wife, Sharla (Gina Gershon). Joe is the alpha wolf, icy cool, who finds a calmness beyond calm, and McConaughey nails the character.

"There does seem to be a bit of an abyss behind those eyes," said McConaughey in his smooth Texas drawl. "A bit of that thousand-mile stare. And he's a guy who is not there to reveal himself. He is there to find revelations. He also needs order and structure. You see the way he goes about his contract, how he goes about his rules. When does he become destructive? When the family is out of order. That would be the simple math to his madness."

That madness earned "Killer Joe" an NC-17 rating. Most producers want nothing to do with an NC-17, which limits theater audiences and DVD distribution.

"The way I understand it," said McConaughey, "the MPAA's NC-17 rating is really about the chicken scene."

SPOILER ALERT: Skip the next paragraph if you don't want plot revelations.

Indeed, whatever mark "Killer Joe" may leave on America's movie conscience, it will forever be remembered for the "chicken scene," in which Joe forces Sharla, in front of her husband, to perform mock oral sex using a chicken leg. It is a seriously messed-up moment that spurs more violence.

Initially, McConaughey thought the harsh rating was because of a sexual scene between Joe and Dottie, in which Dottie recalls a physical encounter from her childhood when she was only 12. If you don't quite catch the dialogue, you might think Dottie, who is supposed to be 18 or 19 in the film and is played by the 23-year-old Temple, is saying she is 12.

"I thought that's what the MPAA was having trouble with, and I thought that could be a simple fix, raise the volume a bit, or get a line in there, 'How old were you?' The reason I thought the chicken scene was in the realm of R is because it's so deliberately provocative. It's hyper-reality. It's got so much what-the-F to it. It's the classic comedy setup. I thought there was something about the deliberation of it that lets it be absurd and lets you laugh, in the way that Tarantino can get away with some of that stuff."

The producers and Friedkin appealed to the MPAA.

"I believe it came back to, 'There are 20 or seconds that need to be cut.' And Billy was very clear, 'No way.' And I was on board with him. 'Please, no. That's it. Let's wear NC-17 as a badge, and shine that badge and go forward.' "

McConaughey, 42, and his wife, model Camila Alves, have a son and daughter -- Levi, 4, and Vida, 2 -- and are expecting their third child. He already has four other films in the works, including "The Paperboy" with Nicole Kidman, and further enhances his dramatic cred in "Mud," playing a fugitive opposite Reese Witherspoon. "Mud," a tear-jerker from "Take Shelter" writer-director Jeff Nichols, screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May but does not have a U.S. release date yet.

Because of the controversy already swirling around "Killer Joe," I asked him if he had any concerns about the violence and beating up a woman.

"No, I didn't have any kind of moral trepidation," he said. "The morality isn't something that came into my decision-making."

Part of the appeal of the indie project was its edginess, he said, and the freedom available outside the restrictions of the studios.

"You don't read the script and go, 'Oh, Warner Bros., $50 million.' You're not going to feel the arms that naturally come in and say, 'Let's bring it back to convention. Come on back to the middle.' You don't feel that. That's one of the reasons why it's fun to tell these kinds of stories that aren't always told in mainstream studio pictures. No one involved with this ever said, 'Let's bring it back to safe.' "