Five years after his last starring role toplining Guy Ritchie’s crime drama The Gentleman, Matthew McConaughey admits he had forgotten how fun acting could be.
“You reminded me,” the Oscar winner says, nodding at America Ferrera, his co-star in The Lost Bus, a new drama now in theatres ahead of its streaming debut on Apple TV+ on Oct. 3.
In recent years, McConaughey had eased back on his work in front of the camera, but was lured back to acting after producer Jamie Lee Curtis and director Paul Greengrass came to him with the character of Kevin McKay and the script for The Lost Bus.
McConaughey plays real-life hero McKay, a school bus driver struggling with his own personal issues at home, who was called in to help rescue 22 children during the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California.
Thanks to the quick-thinking of McKay and school teacher Mary Ludwig (played by Ferrera), all the kids survived what would become the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history.
Ahead of the film’s world premiere at TIFF, McConaughey, Ferrera and Curtis discussed The Lost Bus and what the film has to say about heroism.
Q: Matthew, what was it about The Lost Bus and Kevin McKay that made you excited to return to acting?
McConaughey: This movie was like being on a vacation and when I say it was like a vacation, I don’t mean it was like sitting under a palm tree with a piña colada. … Having a singular obsession with a character in a movie and to act and have a reverence for this craft, and to be able to do that daily for three months was incredibly relaxing. All I had to worry about was my family and my role. That was a joy to do again.
Q: America, what was it about playing Mary Ludwig that intrigued you?
Ferrera: I’m a huge Paul Greengrass fan. But I was drawn to the character journeys … We see Mary getting to a place where she kind of has to reckon with the life she had been living (and ask herself) if she got another chance, what kind of life would she choose? I was really moved by Kevin and Mary’s trajectory toward one another. They start as complete strangers … They start in a place of indifference and then they experience and go through a transformative event in their lives. They meet in this place where they’re both stripped down. To me, it’s such a beautiful human parable. That’s all of us. We’re all going to meet the same truth in the end … I thought that was a really beautiful crux.
Q: Jamie, what was it like to be putting this film together and then seeing the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles earlier this year?
Curtis: I live in Santa Monica and my husband and I were just able to move back eight months later after all the smoke damage, and we’re in an area that survived. I can’t tell you how many people I know who lost everything; their history and their family history. It made me terrified that it was happening again and yet very gratified that somehow we were going to make a movie that would show … the town of Paradise. It was decimated. But it’s still a thriving community. People moved back.
Q: Matthew and America, how do you come away from making a movie like this?
McConaghey: I don’t know if it’s even fair to call people heroes … There are definitely heroic acts, and something that’s consistent with a heroic act is someone that runs toward a crisis instead of away from it. First responders — and I don’t mean just the people where that’s their title — I’m talking about normal people that find themselves in a circumstance that was not on their plan of the day. Something unimaginable just happened and they find themselves at a point where they have to make a decision. And then the will to survive that people have … You find that out as a parent …
Ferrara: For me, heroes have always been everyday people. Growing up my whole life, the people I viewed as heroes in my own life were a teacher or a parent … someone who stopped for a second to change someone else’s day out of sheer humanity or kindness. … Mary and Kevin didn’t choose to become heroes. It’s moment that chose them and called on them to rise to the occasion whether they thought they could or not … we don’t know who we would become under those circumstances, but we suspect, hope, wish … we would make the right choice in those moments. These are two people who made incredibly selfless choices to protect other people’s children.
