Matthew McConaughey says Oscar win gave him a new confidence

Even someone like Matthew McConaughey can use a shot of confidence now and then. Of course, his came by winning an Academy Award, which the actor took home in 2014 (among various other prizes that year) for his role as a dying prescription-drug peddler in Dallas Buyers Club.

“I was confident before, but that helped with my confidence, and confidence is very important in whatever we’re doing in any walk of life,” McConaughey told Yahoo Entertainment (watch above) the CinemaCon in Las Vegas, where he was promoting the upcoming crime drama White Boy Rick, a film that pundits are predicting could put the actor back in the awards race this fall.

The Oscar gold has also given him better opportunities: “I would say probably I get a look at more quality things that are of the ilk of what I want to do, [more] now than before,” he said.

“But I got there in my journey not by looking at the end product — not by thinking, ‘Oh, what can it be?’ but by going, ‘I’m just really gonna go have an experience and enjoy the process of making a movie and the architecture of a character.’ And the results came from that.”

McConaughey has seen mixed results for his efforts since Dallas Buyers, with other passion projects like The Sea of Trees, Free State of Jones, and Gold failing to find an audience, and the big-budget Stephen King adaptation Dark Tower catching a beatdown by critics last summer. (His two most acclaimed films since have both been with voice roles in animation: Sing and Kubo and the Two Strings.)

White Boy Rick, in which McConaughey plays a small-time hustler whose teenage son becomes an informant for the FBI in the 1980s, however, might just give him another boost.

Watch Anthony Mackie admit he has little interest in a Falcon standalone movie:

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