Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey told Entertainment Weekly that How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, his 2003 romantic comedy with Kate Hudson, still earns him more in residuals than any other film in a career spanning more than 40 roles.
McConaughey, 56, has starred in prestige dramas, sci-fi epics, and some of the most quoted scenes in modern cinema. Dallas Buyers Club won him an Academy Award. Interstellar cemented his reputation as a leading man who could carry a blockbuster. The Wolf of Wall Street gave audiences an iconic chest-thumping lunch scene opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. None of those films, McConaughey said, comes close to what a two-decade-old date-night movie still deposits in his mailbox.
In the Entertainment Weekly interview published Thursday, McConaughey put it bluntly:
"It still pays the best mailbox money of any film I've ever done. By far. By lengths."
He offered no dollar figures. But "by lengths", horse-racing shorthand for a margin that isn't close, left little ambiguity about the gap between the rom-com and the rest of his filmography.
McConaughey described a pattern that predates the streaming era. Before audiences could pull up a movie on a phone, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days lived on DVDs and cable reruns, and it had a built-in calendar advantage.
"When it used to be just DVDs or cable, every March I'd get a big check because Valentine's Day."
The math is simple. Couples rented or rewatched the film every February. Residual payments followed a few weeks later. Year after year, the cycle repeated. McConaughey did not say whether the streaming era has changed the size of those checks, but the film's staying power clearly has not faded. He called it "a real anchor in the rom-com genre through time."
That durability stands out. McConaughey burst onto the Hollywood scene in the early 1990s and built a run of romantic comedies through the 2000s, The Wedding Planner in 2001, Failure to Launch in 2006, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past in 2009. Of all of them, the Kate Hudson pairing outlasted the rest.
"I think it's, probably, my favorite rom-com I've done, and a lot of people love that rom-com."
McConaughey traced the film's success back to the first time he and Hudson met. In an April 2024 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he recalled the audition process, not as a formal script reading, but as a vibe check.
"I remember we met on the Paramount lot, I believe it was the time, and those casting sort of meeting couches, especially for rom-coms, you want to see the chemistry between the two leads. You want to see how the jive is. We're not reading through the script. We're not reading lines."
What happened next, he said, was immediate.
"Immediately, [Kate and I] were comfortable with each other and we jacked with each other, and we busted each other's chops, and we laughed a lot. There was a bit of rock and roll exchange, like, 'Oh, this could be some heavyweight fun.' And I think that's why I was cast, and that's why, for whatever extent, it worked."
Hudson offered her own version of the story. In a Vanity Fair video from March 2025, she described McConaughey as one of the great collaborators across all the films she has made.
"With Matthew and I, it is just a very similar type of joie de vivre. We love life, we lead with energy, very competitive by nature, we're competitive with each other, very flirtatious, not afraid to be flirtatious."
She added that the connection translated directly to the screen.
"I think there's just a similar energy that somehow allowed us to be able to really connect onscreen and fall in love. I feel really lucky that I got to experience that with someone as talented and as fun as Matthew."
McConaughey's career arc is unusual. He spent the early 2000s as Hollywood's go-to romantic lead, then reinvented himself with a string of dramatic roles that critics dubbed the "McConaissance." Dallas Buyers Club in 2013 earned him the Oscar. That same year, his brief turn as Mark Hanna in The Wolf of Wall Street, a role he described as "a real launch-pad character", became one of the most imitated scenes in recent movie history. Interstellar followed in 2014.
Any of those films might seem like the obvious residual champion. They carried bigger budgets, wider critical acclaim, and cultural footprints that stretch well beyond date night. Yet none of them matches the steady, compounding income stream of a romantic comedy that cost a fraction of what a Christopher Nolan space epic requires.
McConaughey did not rank the rest of his films by residual earnings or explain why the gap is so wide. He did not disclose specific dollar amounts. But his language, "by far," "by lengths", suggests the difference is not marginal. A rom-com that airs on cable every February, gets rented every Valentine's weekend, and now lives on streaming platforms has a renewable audience that a one-time awards-season drama may not.
Hollywood loves to celebrate prestige. Audiences vote with their remotes. And more than two decades after it hit theaters, a lightweight comedy about a bet between two New Yorkers is still writing the biggest checks in Matthew McConaughey's career. The market has a sense of humor, even if the industry doesn't.
