Handout / SXSW

On the first day shooting “The Rivals of Amziah King,” Matthew McConaughey, his right eye swollen from a bee sting, walked onto the set, raised his hand and asked, “Is anybody else nervous except for me?”

The cast and crew let out a collective laugh. “Alright, alright, alright, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t the only one,” the actor said, sounding like a mixture of a preacher and a surfer with his signature drawl.

But McConaughey wasn’t joking. He admits he felt creaky returning to the screen after a six-year hiatus, during which he wrote a memoir, “Greenlights,” recorded a few voice roles in films like “Sing 2,” spent time with his family and kept a lower profile. “I needed to write my own story, direct my own story on the page,” McConaughey says of his time away from being in front of the camera.

But when he came across Andrew Patterson’s script, which focused on the charismatic owner of a honey operation in Oklahoma and his relationship with his foster child, he was drawn to its originality and strong sense of place. The part fit like a worn-in pair of jeans.

“It’s not where I grew up, but I know of these kind of people and these places and these kind of characters that live in the middle of the country,” McConaughey says. “This group of people in southeast Oklahoma where the film takes place know the Constitution, they know the rules they are living by, and they’re not looking for or getting approval from the rest of the world. I understand them.”

Patterson had labored on the project for years, enlarging it at one point into a seven episode mini-series, before shrinking it back down again. He always felt that McConaughey possessed the free-wheeling charm that he needed for Amziah, who has a roving band of bee-keepers and musicians who follow him like a caravan of apostles.

“I wanted an actor with the type of personality where he could just hang out with them for hours,” he says. “It had to be somebody so disarming, who would just do their thing inside this world I was trying to evoke, and who could be comedic in a dramatic movie. There aren’t many people like that.”

Even on the phone, McConaughey, with his tendency to monologue, exhibits that kind of magnetism. He likes to digress, looping away from a question, before somehow gliding back toward an answer with an easy-going assurance that leaves you more interested in the journey than the destination. And McConaughey doesn’t want this to be a one-sided conversation, asking me what I thought the meaning was behind a certain scene or for my take on the film’s rural backdrop. “Well there you go,” he says encouragingly after I tell him my (not very original) thought that what I like about movies like “The Rivals of Amziah King” is that they take you to places that are different from your reality.

“I guess for a New Yorker, you are pretty far removed from that world,” he says. “So you might see a people and place like this and go, ‘Oh, I didn’t really know that existed, right?’ Which absolutely is the best thing about movies.”

McConaughey says that making “The Rivals of Amziah King,” which opens at SXSW on March 10, helped him rediscover his love for his profession.

“I remembered a couple of things,” he says. “One, how much I truly enjoy performing. Two, I remembered, hey, McConaughey, you’re pretty damn good at this. And three, I remembered that acting is a vacation for me, and what I mean by vacation is that when when I’m performing, it’s my singular focus. When I walk out the door in the morning, my wife says, ‘go kick some ass. I got the kiddos. We’re good.’ That’s vacation. Because I’m not multitasking. I’m not compartmentalizing. I’m fully focused on finding the truth of my character.”

He thinks that writing the book, which saw him comb through pages of diary entries to assemble something that combined poems, prayers and remembrances, also improved his acting.

“The memoir was extremely honest and it forced me to be honest with myself,” McConaughey says. “It cleared up things you’ve been thinking about for 35 years. And it makes you realize that’s kind of who you are, Matthew. Let’s admit that and shake hands. Bravo. That gave me even more trust in myself, because, you know, there was less to maybe hide about myself. I had shared it. So that’s made it easier for me to be honest as an actor.”

That honesty extends to his thoughts on the state of “True Detective,” the twisty anthology series that helped kick off “The McConaissance” when it debuted on HBO in 2014. After teasing the mystery of the Yellow King, it’s continued for three more, intermittently successful seasons, the most of recent of which, “True Detective: North Country,” aired in 2024 and starred Jodie Foster and Kali Reis.

“I watched, I saw it. Yeah, there’s a lot about it that I appreciated,” McConaughey says, haltingly. “My favorite season — and I feel like I can say this objectively — is Season 1.” He’s picking up steam here, sounding tickled by his own admission. “I happen to be in that one, so I thought that was incredible, incredible television and a great series. I watched it weekly, like everyone else, on Sunday night, and that was an event for me. And I got to sit back and enjoy that. I loved the water cooler talk on Monday morning. Even though I made it, I sort of forgot what was going to happen next. It was one of the great events in TV.”

“True Detective,” which found McConaughey sharing the screen with his good buddy Woody Harrelson, was a two-hander, one that required its stars to have an easy chemistry. The same is true of “The Rivals of Amziah King,” with McConaughey sharing the task of carrying the movie with newcomer Angelina LookingGlass. She plays Kateri, Amziah’s long-lost foster daughter who he brings back into the family business. LookingGlass got the part after an extensive nationwide search with the production testing more than 200 indigenous actors.

“Angelina had the most infectious smile, but she can turn it on a dime and just stare a hole through a person,” Patterson raves. “We knew the second she read with Matthew that the part was hers.”

McConaughey can’t heap enough praise on LookingGlass, enthusing about her abilities several times during our interview.

“She only knows how to do what so many of us actors forget to do when we learn to quote, unquote, act, which is listen and respond honestly to the truth of a situation,” McConaughey says. “That’s it. That’s the secret. An actor doesn’t want to get caught acting. Every actor worth their salt knows what I’m talking about.”