‘Killer Joe’ a Tough Character to Grasp
Matthew McConaughey plays the title role in "Killer Joe," opening this weekend. Photo courtesy LD EntertainmentAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Matthew McConaughey plays the title role in the new movie Killer Joe, a Texas police detective who works as a hit man on the side and gets hired by a family to kill their mother. When the family can’t come up with Joe’s advance he demands the family’s daughter as a “retainer.”
McConaughey talked with KUT’s Jennifer Stayton about being so disgusted the first time he read the script he threw it away, but then took a second look at the character.
Something in the understated humor, the absurdity of it, sort of opened me up to seeing the humanity of this guy, and turned me on to planting a real original take on this guy Joe, who is a really well-written character. Tracy Letts, who wrote the script, has a certain meter and a certain rhythm that I did not see the first time I read it. And once I locked into his rhythm, I understood what the pregnant pauses were about, what the big silences were about, what the incomplete sentences, how they were deliberate. Then I found the music of the guy, and that’s when I was really turned on by it.
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