Keanu Reeves in ‘Point Break.’ Photo: 20th Century Fox.
Preview:
A TV series based on 1991’s ‘Point Break’ is in development.
AMC Network is backing the project.
David Kalstein will run the show.
1991 action thriller ‘Point Break’ has been through the remake wringer once before (see more on that lower down the page), but according to Deadline, cable channel AMC has decided to try again, this time developing the concept as a TV series.
David Kalstein, who recently worked on Prime Video series ‘Butterfly’ (which starred Daniel Dae Kim as an intelligence agent working in Korea), will be overseeing the eventual show.
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It’s hardly the first time AMC has looked to convert a 1990s movie into a series –– it has seen success with Anne Rice adaptation ‘Interview with the Vampire,’ which has spawned a small-screen franchise based on the author’s work.
(L to R): Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in ‘Point Break.’ Photo: 20th Century Fox.
The original movie, which was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by W. Peter Iliff, starred Keanu Reeves as rookie FBI agent Johnny Utah, who infiltrates the Ex-Presidents, a gang of Southern California surfers who rob banks.
The Ex-Presidents, who wear masks of Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon B. Johnson, are led by Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi, and Utah gets swept up in their daredevil lifestyle before a massive action chase and a reunion amid lethal waves.
A bigger question is how the concept can be stretched in order to fit the TV format; though Deadline’s story does at least offer some details: the series is set 35 years after the events of the original film and is focused on a dangerous heist crew with ties to the Ex-Presidents gang.
And converting movies to TV series has been a hit and miss prospect of late, with the likes of ‘Lethal Weapon’ failing to spark.
When will the new ‘Point Break’ TV series be on screens?
It’s clearly early days for this one, so AMC Networks has yet to announce when the show might be hitting our screens. We’re not sure we expect it much before 2027, though.
(L to R): Patrick Swayze, James Le Gros, Bojesse Christopher and John Philbin in ‘Point Break.’ Photo: 20th Century Fox.
Opening in theaters on August 9th is the new action-comedy ‘Borderlands’, which is based on the popular video game of the same name and was written and directed by Eli Roth (‘Thanksgiving’).
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with writer and director Eli Roth about his work on ‘Borderlands,’ the challenges of adapting a video game, cracking the story, the all-star cast, and making movies outside of the horror genre.
You can read the full interview below or click on the video player above to watch the interview.
Moviefone: To begin with, can you talk about the challenges of adapting a video game and cracking the story for ‘Borderlands’?
Eli Roth: Well, the story, that was producer Ari Arad and Randy Pitchford, who spent a long time with different writers trying different permutations until they settled on this story, and then that’s when they came to me. So, one of the things we talked about was how do we change stuff and adapt it from a video game to a movie, but I had the game creator Randy with me there the whole time. There are certain things that you obviously want to be faithful to, like the costumes, the design, the guns, the tech. There are certain things that are beloved in the game, and we could fill the movie with Easter eggs, but obviously in casting the movie, you’re going to cast people in real life that look different than the characters in the game. So that’s the first thing. It’s a very, very violent game, but to render the universe at this scale, the studio wants to make a PG-13 movie, and I wanted to make something for the nine-year-old boy in me that if this is a movie, if you’ve never played the game before and you take kids to go see at 10 or 11-years old, they’re going to laugh their ass off and have a great time. I wanted something that was just totally bonkers, a movie that was unhinged and fun. You can just turn off your brain, grab a bucket of popcorn and have a good time.
Moviefone: Did you play the game for research, and what did you like most about the source material?
ER: It’s so fun. Yes, I did play the game. I’m terrible at games, so I had to have Christy Pitchford take me through the game co-playing with her. But I love it. I love the sense of humor. Randy Pitchford and I are of the same age and have the same influences, whether it was ‘Mad Max’ or ‘Escape from New York’ or ‘Star Wars’. I love the creatures. I love the sense of insanity. I love the world. I love the detritus of the world. They’re trying to make something beautiful out of it and the trashed planet, and it made me think of ‘The Fifth Element’ and what I saw in that movie, and just the colors of that film and the Gaultier costumes that just blew my mind. So, to get to render something at that scale, I want it to feel like you took all your fluorescent pink neon clothes, put them in the dryer, sprinkled in some glitter, and then it just exploded everywhere and caught fire at the same time. So that was the idea of rendering something that didn’t look like any other movie you had seen before.
MF: Can you talk about putting together this terrific cast of actors?
ER: I had an amazing experience working with Cate and Jack on ‘The House with a Clock in Its Walls’, the kid’s movie I did with Amblin, and Cate was the first one I called. I said, “I’m making this insane kind of spaghetti western space opera, fun sci-fi video game adaptation, and I need someone to be a total badass, like Clint Eastwood in ‘The Man with No Name’ or Snake Plissken in ‘Escape from New York’,” and she’s like, “I’m in. Let’s do it.” So, Cate learned to twirl guns. She wanted to shoot, she wanted to do her own stunts. We put her in a harness, she was 100 feet in the air on wires. Then I said, “All right, what if you grab a flamethrower and you light these guys on fire?” So, Cate, she learned to do it. She’s really shooting a flamethrower in that scene. So, it was incredible. Once you have Cate, she’s actor bait. Everybody wants to act with Cate. So, I called Jack right away, said, “She’s going to be a pissed off bounty hunter, and you’re the annoying robot,” and he’s a big ‘Borderlands’ player, so he knew Claptrap, he was all in. Then Jamie Lee said she wanted to play Tannis, which was my first choice and she said yes. he’s like, “You had me at Cate Blanchett.” So, it’s great to be able to unite those screen icons in a movie, and the two of them became close friends. Everyone bonded on this movie. We were shooting in the pandemic, so there was a curfew in Budapest. We weren’t allowed out after 8:00pm, and the world of ‘Borderlands’ became our reality. So, everybody got close. We made lifelong friends on that movie, and you can feel that bond with the characters on screen.
MF: Finally, you are probably best known for making horror movies. But do you also enjoy working in other genres?
ER: I do. I love it. I’ve noticed, if I do too many horror films in a row, I start to get burnout. So, whether I switch and made my documentary ‘Fin’ about saving sharks or ‘Death Wish’, which is completely different, it’s good for me to switch it up and challenge myself creatively and learn new skills. You learn something every time, every day on set. Every shot, you’re learning something new. So, it’s great. I shot ‘Thanksgiving’ after ‘Borderlands’, so I learned how long the post-production is on ‘Borderlands’. So, it’s good for me to go back and forth, but obviously horror movies are my passion and my love. But if you do too many in a row… I never want to get tired of doing it.
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What is the plot of ‘Borderlands’?
Bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett) is hired by interstellar business mogul Atlas (Edgar Ramírez) to find his missing daughter and the soldier-for-hire, Roland (Kevin Hart), who was sent to rescue her. The mission takes Lilith back to her ruined home planet, Pandora, where she reluctantly teams with Roland, a muscleman named Krieg (Florian Munteanu), a loopy scientist named Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), a wisecracking robot (Jack Black), and the girl herself, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), to battle monsters and vicious marauders while searching for a secret that could unleash unimaginable power.
A loud, clattering, off-brand mash-up of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’ and other recent tentpoles, ‘Borderlands’ is based on the hugely successful first-person shooter video game franchise launched in 2009 by Gearbox Software. Fans of the game can assess how faithful the movie, mostly directed by horror auteur Eli Roth (‘Thanksgiving’), is to the game, but as a film this fails on a number of levels.
‘Borderlands’ is simply dull, thanks to a bland script and setting, cheap-looking production values, and a cast that seems terrific on paper but veers between performances that are either bored or overwrought. Filmed more than three years ago in the spring and summer of 2021, ‘Borderlands’ collected dust until Tim Miller (‘Deadpool’) came on to direct reshoots in early 2023 when Roth proved unavailable. Either way, with recent video game adaptations like ‘Fallout’ and ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ earning praise for their approach to translating their games to the screen, ‘Borderlands’ is a disappointing throwback, a film that looks and plays like it came out of the 1990s, right down to the crappy CG and the pounding heavy metal needle drops.
As Cate Blanchett’s expository voice-over tells us at the beginning, a long-extinct alien race named the Eridians used to rule the galaxy, leaving behind some powerful artifacts hidden in secret “Vaults” throughout the cosmos that ruthless corporations like Atlas and Dahl, along with independent “Vault Hunters,” are interested in obtaining. Blanchett herself plays Lilith, a bounty hunter who is hired by Atlas himself (Edgar Ramirez) to ostensibly find his kidnapped daughter, Tina (Ariana Greenblatt). She’s gone missing on the planet Pandora (yes, same name as the planet in the ‘Avatar’ movies) along with the soldier sent to retrieve her, Roland (Kevin Hart).
Pandora also happens to be Lilith’s home world, and when she arrives there she finds it to be devastated by corporate mining and colonization efforts, with gangs of former prison laborers known as Psychos now roaming the land. She also finds Tina in short order, along with Roland, but the girl does not want to be rescued and shows her resistance by hurling explosive stuffed bunnies in Lilith’s direction. Nevertheless, Lilith, Tina, and Roland eventually team up – along with Tina’s self-styled bodyguard and former Psycho Krieg (Florian Munteanu), an eccentric scientist named Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a motormouth robot named Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black) – to block Atlas’s real agenda, which is to find a Vault hidden on Pandora and unlock the unimaginable power stored within.
The problem with ‘Borderlands,’ as with many video game adaptations, is that the movie must do a lot of world-building in a short period of time, leading to things like that voice-over narration and reams of expository dialogue. ‘Borderlands’ falls victim to this early on, mixing and matching characters from various editions of the game in a stop-and-start narrative that either comes to a crashing halt to explain its convoluted mythology or races from one frenetic action scene to another without balancing the two effectively. This leaves no room for any real character development, and while a pro like Blanchett tries hard, the cast falls into the ‘lovable band of rogues and misfits’ trope without doing anything to make it unique.
The movie is also hampered by its production values, which look cheap, constricted, and derivative despite a reported $120 million budget. Set on a world devastated by indifferent corporate colonizing, the movie looks like it was shot in perhaps two quarries made to look like junkyards (one character even asks at one point if there’s a way to escape that doesn’t involve schlepping through garbage). The post-apocalyptic wasteland has been done to death, and the fact that the Psychos resemble extras from the recent ‘Mad Max’ movies doesn’t help.
If Roth (or Miller) isn’t shooting in one of the film’s two junkyards, then they’re staging sequences in murky underground corridors and hallways that cinematographer Rogier Stoffers can’t solve. The result is an especially drab film all around. Adding to the problems, ‘Borderlands’ is rated PG-13, so Roth isn’t able to indulge his proclivities for copious amounts of blood and gore; the choppy editing suggests that much of this is being held back for a future ‘uncut’ release.
A finale laden with mediocre CGI only exacerbates the sense that this is a production where things went south pretty quickly, and the movie rapidly descends into a kind of numbing, generic rhythm that is thankfully only ameliorated by its relatively brief 100-minute runtime.
We’re not exactly sure how Cate Blanchett got roped into this, although she and Jack Black both starred in Roth’s slapdash 2018 Y/A fantasy, ‘The House with a Clock in Its Walls.’ Whatever her reasons, we’re not going to place this among the Australian actor’s finest performances. She’s good, never less than professional, but at times she doesn’t seem to know how seriously she should be taking any of it, and her CG-infused arc near the end of the film just ends up looking silly.
Jack Black has no such problems: for one thing, he’s never onscreen since he’s the voice of the R2-D2/BB-8 hybrid robot known as Claptrap, and as such gets the film’s best and funniest lines. Claptrap acts as a commentator on the action, edging close to a ‘Deadpool’-like breaking of the fourth wall (although it never happens) and offering up a stream of patter that alternates between sarcastic quips and ill-time bursts of into. But even Black’s energetic routine gets wearisome after 100 minutes or so of listening to Claptrap babble on.
We’re not sure what Jamie Lee Curtis is doing as the usually reliable actor plays Tannis as a weird combination of loopy and wearily cynical, with the two sides of her admittedly thin personality never meshing well. Kevin Hart is curiously low-energy, although he does pull off a few decent action moves, and while we dislike giving the thumbs-down to a young actor, Ariana Greenblatt (‘Barbie’) delivers an incredibly annoying, tic-laden performance as Tiny Tina, a character so poorly developed and inconsistently written that her central role in the story makes her faulty work even more grating.
We should have known we were in trouble the minute we saw Avi Arad listed as a producer on ‘Borderlands.’ While Arad was instrumental in the creation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he was long gone by the time it became a cultural phenomenon. He’s instead continued to plunder his stake in the Sony Spider-Man Universe with lackluster misfires like the ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ and ‘Venom’ films, along with 2002’s equally forgettable adaptation of the ‘Uncharted’ video game.
‘Borderlands’ fits neatly into that filmography as a generic, soulless sci-fi actioner that really lacks any sort of distinctive personality or creative spark (a quick online search reveals that fans of the game are also disgruntled with what they’ve seen of the movie via trailers and clips). And while Eli Roth is no one’s idea of a great filmmaker, he’s out of his element here and unable to deploy the deliberately sleazy horror/exploitation tropes that at least make films like ‘Hostel’ and ‘The Green Inferno’ identifiable as his. ‘Borderlands’ is simply product, manufactured to cash in on a successful property without any understanding of what makes that property popular or why it should appeal to non-gamers.
‘Borderlands’ receives 2.5 out of 10 stars.
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What is the plot of ‘Borderlands’?
Bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett) is hired by interstellar business mogul Atlas (Edgar Ramírez) to find his missing daughter and the soldier-for-hire, Roland (Kevin Hart), who was sent to rescue her. The mission takes Lilith back to her ruined home planet, Pandora, where she reluctantly teams with Roland, a muscleman named Krieg (Florian Munteanu), a loopy scientist named Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), a wisecracking robot (Jack Black), and the girl herself, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), to battle monsters and vicious marauders while searching for a secret that could unleash unimaginable power.
There has been some disturbed chatter in the last couple of days about video game adaptation ‘Borderlands’, which ‘Hostel’ and ‘Cabin Fever’ director Eli Roth shot way back in 2021 (it was long enough ago that star Cate Blanchett has had time to shoot ‘Tár’, which has just hit theaters).
But with word that Roth has stepped away from the film ahead of some re-shoots, there was naturally concern that it’s all gone a little wrong and that the director has somehow been fired.
Lionsgate is stepping up to do a little damage control and now comes word via Deadline that it’s more to do with a schedule clash.
Roth, you see, is finally ready to make the full-length movie ‘Thanksgiving’, spawned from a fake trailer he made to contribute to Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’ ‘Grindhouse’.
It was popular enough that there was talk of a full movie based on the trailer, but while Roth has sometimes mentioned it, he’s finally ready to make it a reality.
‘Thanksgiving’––in fake trailer form at least––features a slasher who makes his own carving board out of the inhabitants of a Massachusetts town during the annual turkey day. One of the pivotal scenes involved Roth himself, separated from his head while in the throes of passion with a date in a convertible.
(L to R) Director and actor Eli Roth and Brad Pitt in ‘Inglourious Basterds.’
Now, of course, there could be more to it than anyone is willing to admit––given the long post-production process of ‘Borderlands’, surely there has been time for Roth to schedule making ‘Thanksgiving’ so that it doesn’t clash with ‘Borderlands’. But movie shooting schedules can be tough to figure out with so much that needs to happen, so perhaps it really is just timing.
Still, the addition of Tim Miller––who last made ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’––is an interesting one. He’s got plenty of experience with the sort of effects load that might be involved in even re-shoots of something along the lines of the game adaptation.
‘Borderlands’ adapts the popular game title and stars Blanchett as Lilith, an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past, reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of the universe’s most powerful man Atlas (Edgar Ramirez).
Lilith forms an alliance with an unexpected team – Roland (Kevin Hart), a former elite mercenary, now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), a feral pre-teen demolitionist; Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Tina’s musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector; Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), the scientist with a tenuous grip on sanity; and Claptrap (Jack Black), a persistently wiseass robot.
These unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power. The fate of the universe could be in their hands – but they’ll be fighting for something more: each other.
Naturally, ‘Borderlands’ has yet to announce a release date, but it’ll certainly need to impress to keep up with the current trend of successful movies and shows based on games.
Cate Blanchett as treasure hunter Lilith in Lionsgate’s ‘Borderlands.’
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If you’re curious as to what new movie this week might be best for you, Moviefone is here to help you find it and watch it. This week’s films feature heavy drama, child stars, pretend werewolves, young entrepreneurs, and off-beat parenting. Here are the movies we’re suggesting this week:
Cherry (Apple TV+)
Tom Holland in ‘Cherry’
If it seems like Tom Holland is everywhere these days, he is. In fact, he’s standing right behind you. This week on Apple TV+, he plays an Iraq veteran who returns home a war hero with serious PTSD. Fortunately for him, his true love Emily (Ciara Bravo) is there for him, but their life together isn’t without challenges. He spirals into drug use and crime, and keeps the worst possible company, and ends up in danger of losing the only things that keep him going.
Watch It If: You love the collaboration of Tom Holland along with directors Anthony and Joe Russo of Marvel fame, and would love to see something a little (a lot) grittier than Spidey.
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Kid 90 (Hulu)
Soleil Moon Frye in ‘kid 90’
If it cheers you up to think of better days gone by, tune into Hulu for this documentary made by a former child star about herself and other kids on the precipice of fame in the 90s. Soleil Moon Frye from Punky Brewster (available now as a reboot, of course) filmed every second of her life before it was cool or common, and she captured friends like Mark Paul Gosselar and Bryan Austin Green, plus other recognizable faces from kids with only two names.
Watch It If: You enjoy intimate portraits of people who assume every aspect of their lives is going to fascinate you (and it probably will), and if you consider it a sport to yell at the TV giving warnings to people who can’t hear you about the directions their shows and careers would take.
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Yes Day (Netflix)
(L to R) Edgar Ramirez, Jenna Ortega, Everly Carganilla, Julian Lerner, and Jennifer Garner in ‘Yes Day’
Parents are so lame, always wanting to keep their kids from doing cool stuff like breaking limbs, costing them a fortune in cleaning bills, and eating candy for every meal. Jennifer Garner and Edgar Ramirez are two such buzzkill parents, so when their kids challenge them to a day of saying only yes, they have their work cut out for them. Chaos ensues, taking the family on one adventure after another–and certainly a couple of massive cleaning bills along the way.
Watch It If: As a parent, you love giving your children terrible ideas. And if you don’t have kids, it’s just fun stuff to do when you can start having parties again.
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Own the Room (Disney+)
Daniela Blanco, Co-founder of Sunthetics in ‘Own the Room’
The Global Student Entrepreneur Awards are being held in Macau, China, and this Nat Geo documentary chronicles the lives of five entrants from all across the globe. Audiences will meet Alondra in Puerto Rico who works at her family bakery, Santosh, a Nepalese farmer, Henry, a programming genius from Nairobi, Jason from Greece who loves marketing, and Daniela, an immigrant fleeing the crisis in Venezuela. They’re competing for a $100,000 prize that will change their lives and make their businesses a reality.
Watch It If: You need a dose of inspiration and want to feel like the future is bright, and have children who will join the movement.
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The Dead of Night (On Demand, Digital)
Lance Henriksen and Colby Crain in ‘The Dead of Night’
Siblings Tommy (Jake Etheridge) and June (Colby Crain) run a ranch in an isolated part of the country. Nearby, some shady drifters have donned wolf masks and are beginning a murder spree that’s going to turn the town upside down. They leave some bodies near the ranch, spurring fear and condemnation from the community, and then the lycanthropic wannabes set their sights on the ranch and the siblings that live on it.
Watch It If: You feel compelled to howl at the moon, and at some appearances by Lance Henriksen and Matthew Lawrence.
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Trust (In Theaters and On Demand)
Victoria Justice and Lucien Laviscount in ‘Trust’
Victoria Justice plays Brooke, a strong woman who has it all–great husband Owen (Matthew Daddario), successful art gallery, and in this movie, a new artist (Lucien Laviscount) she signed that promises to be very good for business and very bad for her marriage. While she is away on a business trip to Paris with the painter who clearly wants to make her the subject of one of his racy, intimate paintings, Owen runs into some temptation of his own in the form of a journalist (Katherine McNamara).
Watch It If: You grew up seeing Victoria Justice on Nickelodeon’s Victorious and are ready to see her tackle entrepreneurship and infidelity, or if you’ve had to sop up the drool after seeing Lucien Laviscount on Coronation Street.
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Adverse (VOD & DVD/Blu-ray)
Mickey Rourke in ‘Adverse’
Ethan (Thomas Nicholas) is a rideshare driver trying to make ends meet and take care of his sister Mia (Kelly Arjen). When he learns that she has gotten tangled up with a crazy drug dealer named Kaden (Mickey Rourke) and disappears, he becomes desperate to find her. He creates a plan to become close to Kaden as his driver and obliterate his team in the process.
Watch It If: You’re in the mood for a crime thriller and/or Thomas Nicholas dropping his middle name (Ian) intrigues you.
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The six-episode miniseries is written by David E. Kelley, based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel “You Should Have Known.” He serves as showrunner, and Susanne Bier is directing. The story follows successful therapist Grace Sachs (Kidman) as her life unravels in a series of crises, including the disappearance of her husband (Grant). She then works to rebuild her life, with support from her father (Sutherland). Noah Jupe plays her young son.
Ramirez is set to play a detective named Joe Mendoza, while Rabe will play a woman named Sylvia Steinetz. He recently portrayed the victim of a crime, Gianni Versace, in Season 2 of FX’s “American Crime Story.” Rabe, on the other hand, stars in TNT’s upcoming “Tell Me Your Secrets,” and has previously starred in films such as “Miss Stevens” and “Vice.”
The upcoming limited series is executive produced by Kelley via David E. Kelley Productions. Bier serves as executive producer as well, along with Kidman and Per Saari of Blossom Films and Bruna Papandrea of Made Up Stories.
Just call her Countess Jessica Passi de Preposulo– even if she’ll never call herself that, officially.
Jessica Chastain married Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo this past weekend at his family’s Italian estate north of Venice. According to People, the Passi de Preposulo family is one of the most noble in Italy, dating back to the year 973. (And they make their own prosecco.) The family still reportedly uses their count and countess titles, even though the Italian aristocracy is no longer recognized by the government. It’s still a cool name-only title.
The wedding had a seriously swanky guest list, including Chastain’s friends and co-stars Edgar Ramirez, of “Zero Dark Thirty,” Anne Hathaway of “Interstellar,” and Emily Blunt of “Snow White and the Huntsman.”
Check out People’s wedding photos, showing Chastain’s beautiful dress and her arriving guests.
Jessica’s new husband works in high fashion, currently for the French fashion brand Moncler. Chastain is usually very private about her personal life, but she has posted a few loving shots with her man in the five years they’ve reportedly been together.
Family life will be more than a little complicated for Penelope Cruz in her upcoming film “Love Child.”
The actress is attached to star alongside Edgar Ramirez in the upcoming project from director Todd Solondz, Deadline reports. Cruz will play the mother of an unusual 11-year-old boy — one determined to keep her attention to himself. If you’ve ever taken any psychology classes, your Oedipus complex alarm bells should be ringing.
Junior, in spite of his harmless-sounding name, is quite the scheming kid. To get rid of his abusive father, he tries to plan an “accident” to kill him. When that doesn’t work, he encourages another man to win over his mother, only to then try to frame him for his father’s murder.
Oddly, the film is supposed to be comedic, so they’ll lighten it up somehow. Maybe it’s kind of like a really, really dark “Parent Trap”? In any case, Cruz has done it all, so playing mother to a malicious offspring should be no problem.
This Time Matthew McConaughey Gains Weight, for Gold
Matthew McConaughey famously, and dangerously, wasted away to play a drug hustler with AIDS for his Oscar-winning turn in “Dallas Buyers Club.”
Now he packs on the pounds and loses a lot of hair to channel another hustler, Kenny Wells, a down-on-his-luck prospector who rises from the dusty bars of Reno to the upper echelons of Wall Street in “Gold.”
“Fun,” says McConaughey of his latest physical transformation. “It’s in service of the guy Kenny Wells. I didn’t plan on putting on a bunch of weight. I just started living like Kenny and all of a sudden looked up in the mirror and I was getting kind of big. I was like: Well, this is the guy. And so down that road we went.”
Matthew McConaughey Serves as Producer and Star of Gold
Also a producer on the film, McConaughey tells Made in Hollywood reporter Damaris Diaz that he took on the project because he related to the main character.
“I grew up meeting guys like Kenny Wells through my father, was privy to deals that my dad would make with guys like Kenny Wells,” says the Texas-raised actor. “My dad had some Kenny Wells in him: Hard-living, hustlers, at the bottom of the barrel, but optimistic as a survival mechanism, every single day to say, Today is going to be the day. And it usually wasn’t. But you get up again tomorrow and you do it again and you say it again and you believe it again. And most of them never found their ‘gold.’ They never made it. But this is the story about a guy chasing down the American dream and did find it.”
McConaughey also was drawn to the rags-to-riches story.
“Look at the dynamic,” he says. “We don’t even know what the character is and you say, We’re going to follow a guy from the dusty bars of Reno to the jungles of Indonesia to the top floor in Wall Street. Well, I want to know, What story and who’s going to take us to those places? On a producing level, that’s already a dynamic landscape. … And then to follow this guy, who starts when you meet him at the very bottom, and get to the very top, by hook or by crook, hustles his way in, makes it happen, almost wills it to happen, that’s fun.”
Why Sexiest Man Alive Matthew McConaughey Likes to Look His Worst in Gold
And so, says the former People magazine “Sexiest Man Alive,” he ha no problem looking his worst on screen.
“The guys I met didn’t have dentists. The guys that I met that were Kenny Wellses, you chip you front tooth, you Super Glue it back and you don’t flinch and it’s no big deal,” he says. “Guys like Kenny Wells are too busy hustling and surviving to sit there and look in the mirror or have concerns with what they look like. They’re too busy trying to hustle.”
Our first look at the film — from director Ericson Core, the cinematographer for the first “Fast and Furious” movie — takes a page from that franchise’s playbook in terms of delivering a crime thriller with crazy, adrenaline-fueled action scenes. Unlike the “Fast & Furious” films, this remake seems to have a very serious tone as FBI Agent Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) struggles to take down a team of Xtreme athletes-turned-crooks lead by Bodhi (Edgar Ramirez).
In between shots of the bad guys literally skydiving through piles of money and jumping off cliffs without parachutes, the trailer drops uh-maz-ing bits of dialog — like this one from Agent Utah:
“I believe that, like me, the people behind these robberies are extreme athletes… Using their skills to disrupt the international financial markets.”
There is life before, and life after, that line.
“Point Break,” which also stars Teresa Palmer, hits theaters Christmas Day.
Preview:
Just call her Countess Jessica Passi de Preposulo– even if she’ll never call herself that, 
Family life will be more than a little complicated for 
If