For most of the 2000s, McConaughey made middling rom-coms (The Wedding Planner? Fool’s Gold? Sahara? Failure to Launch?). At the time, it seemed like he was floundering, or at least idling. People saw his story as a cautionary tale: the Icarus of the box office. But perhaps he was just lying in wait. The other leading men of the 90s and early aughts—DiCaprio, Pitt, Damon, Clooney, Washington, Hanks, Affleck, Smith—remained working, and still work today, but there was a new class on the rise. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, playing tortured lovers, set a new standard for depth and sensitivity; Philip Seymour Hoffman went so deep into his Capote performance that he practically disappeared; Forest Whitaker took on the role of a dictator with Shakespearean intensity; Daniel Day-Lewis began his long-term collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson. Among this group, McConaughey’s blowsy swagger felt out of place, or out of favor. And then he decided to win an Oscar.

As concepts of masculinity expand, the leading man must become elastic.

Dallas Buyers Club, a film for which McConaughey lost 38 pounds to play the AIDS activist Ron Woodroof, is exactly the kind of project an actor takes on when he is seeking recognition from the Academy. It has it all: self-sacrifice (the hollowed-out cheekbones of the Method player); a weighty, often taboo social theme; a director with a spare, minimalist shooting style. Magic Mike, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Dallas Buyers Club gave McConaughey one of the best periods of his career, between 2013 and 2014, so much so that critics, including myself, hailed it as the “McConaissance.” Somewhere, he had reconnected with his drive. He played three different roles that showed off his range—absurdist humor as the honey-voiced M.C. of an adult cabaret, hard edges for the Scorsese film about the ravages of capitalism, vulnerability and darkness as Woodroof. It was exciting to see a person’s ambition activate in real time, but it was also enervating. He’d always had the talent, he’d just chosen to coast.

And now he’s playing Moondog. I see this not as the beginning of another fallow period but as a kind of active acceptance of his getting older, and of a changing Hollywood landscape. The McConaissance may be the last big wave of success that an actor who got his start in the 90s will ride, and in that way it is the end of an era. This is a good thing! It has cleared a pathway for new kinds of leading men. Chadwick Boseman, Daniel Kaluuya, and Winston Duke, who between Get Out and Black Panther (and Jordan Peele’s upcoming Us) have redefined the blockbuster. Timothée Chalamet and Lucas Hedges play with dialogues around gender and sensitivity. Perhaps Armie Hammer is McConaughey’s closest descendant, in his galloping affability, and yet even he continues to take on stranger, more challenging roles—he’ll appear in the creepy thriller Wounds this year, followed by the sequel to Call Me by Your Name. As concepts of masculinity continue to expand in Hollywood—the old structures that upheld it are clearly flawed, as the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements have shown—the leading man must become elastic.

But perhaps the biggest shift is that the box-office conversation is not really about men at all. Women are carrying films now. A recent media-research study found that of 350 high-grossing films between 2014 and 2017, those starring women fared the best, and films that passed the Bechdel test (where women have relationships that don’t revolve around discussing or chasing men) fared best of all. While Bradley Cooper (another McConaughey type who spent a few years in the wilds of television and light comedies before doing a prestige blitz) directed the new A Star Is Born remake, the film succeeded due to the high-wattage performance of Lady Gaga. Regina Hall and Regina King are grabbing enough awards to live up to their queenly names, while Olivia Colman is about to become a household name in America for her portrayals of historical queens in The Favourite (for which she won the Golden Globe) and soon in The Crown. The new grandes dames of cinema—Viola, Amy, Anne, Emma, Julianne, Jennifer, Lupita—seem to be boundless and unafraid of risk, perhaps because the past few years have felt like a reckoning, peeling back the ways that women have been chronically undervalued in Hollywood. So what does this mean for McConaughey and his generation, not to mention his likeness? In many ways, it is the beginning of a new freedom. When the systemic strictures loosen in Hollywood, they loosen for everyone. He is now able to fully pursue his dark weirdness. Moondog is a character in pain, a pain that no one can see because he masks it with bleach and floral-print fabrics. McConaughey plays this sunny despair so well that it casts a pall on his gilded youth. Now when I watch the audition video, I see that the laconic surfer was always cruising on a dark current. Now he can ride the curl.

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