Matthew McConaughey Asked Timothée Chalamet a Really Good Question, Actually
Let's talk about the death of "Act 1s"
On February 24th 2026, Matthew McConaughey sat with Timothée Chalamet for Chalamet & McConaughey, A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event. The former on-screen father-son duo discuss topics such as Interstellar (2014); Marty Supreme (2025), and take questions from current students at the University of Texas’s Austin Moody College of Communication.
Has anybody watched the entire interview?
When Chalamet began to catch heat for his response to McConaughey, I hesitated to take a stance. I watched the clip. I couldn’t really believe my ears either. But I didn’t want to fall into the trap of writing a think piece from a seconds-long clip pulled from what was ultimately an hour-long interview. It just felt like a great way to form the wrong opinion. So I typed “Matthew McConaughey Timothée Chalamet” into YouTube and clicked on Variety’s video.
I learned something interesting in the first five minutes of this interview. The University of Texas is Matthew McConaughey’s alma mater. He’s also currently teaching a film class titled “Script to Screen” there. This makes the question he asked Timothée even more of a compelling one to me.
Act 1, though. In this day of shorter attention spans and vertical, 12-second spots, are we losing attention and the patience for Act 1s? Because it’s the first thing that gets cut. It’s the first thing that a studio wants to get rid of. I’m seeing Act 2 more and more start on fricking Page 12. I’m seeing 10-part series that BAM–Act 1’s over 32 minutes into the opening episode and you’re off on the conflict right away and I’m going ‘Ah!’ It feels abbreviated to me. Am I feeling something?
I’m currently enrolled in a Creative Writing Thesis course as part of my Creative Writing major at Western University. To pass the year-long course, I must complete a minimum 12 500-word creative piece of my choosing. According to my supervisor, most students use the course to start their novel manuscripts. I’ve been wanting to write a book ever since I was 9, so using the class to work towards this goal felt like a good idea.
Novels are on average 80 000 words, so the first 12 500 words of one necessarily comprise the First Act. I’ve been hacking at my thesis since September and, while I’m far from an expert, I’ve grown quite familiar with Act 1s and what makes them work. This familiarity was acquired through the obsessive analysis of Act 1s from a variety of media such as books, movies and TV shows. I’ve compiled these into various lists across book, TV and movie-tracking sites, but that’s a story for another time.
Today, I’m admittedly disappointed that Chalamet’s comments have overshadowed the rest of his and McConaughey’s discussion. In asking Timothée Chalamet the question quoted above, Matthew McConaughey hit the nail on the head. Act 1s are getting shorter, and very much so for the wrong reasons.
Act 1 is meant to be boring
It’s no secret that Hollywood’s keen on saving money anywhere they see fit, but it’s also not a mystery that many of the people making these decisions have a poor understanding of the corner’s they’re cutting and why. At least from where I’m standing.
McConaughey said it best. “[Act 1] is the first thing that gets cut” by studios. In the age of shortening attention spans and second-screen-safe media, there seems to be a growing desire to get to the meat of a story as soon as possible. Unfortunately, as I’ve come to learn over the course of this academic year, this is at the cost of ensuring your audience understands what they’re being thrown into.
McCONAUGHEY, [22:45]: It helps for us to become obsessed with things in that way. And I think obsession is hard but I think it’s a necessary thing to do and create art. That translates.
This quote, to me, ties back to the Act 1 question. Especially in storytelling, obsession is often a prerequisite for the Set Up. It’s where you render all your research and everything you know about your character and story and setting so that your reader is able to follow the story later on. If you’re choosing to cut corners by cutting Act 1, you’re sacrificing your viewers’ understanding.
Act 1 is often boring because it’s context. Not strictly or necessarily so, but more so because things often go over our heads when we don’t yet understand their significance. I often find that I enjoy Act 1 so much more on rewatches. Hints that went over my head make perfect sense and foreshadowing reads more obviously on the second go. Act 1 is the part we all love to revisit and decode.
One of the beautiful things – and I’d like to discuss this with you is – you show 8 episodes or however many episodes and you get a really lengthy first act. Like, three episodes of a first act. Wherein a film script if it’s a 120-page script you get 35 minutes for the first act. The actor’s favourite part is the first act. Because that’s the place where, if all the stories have been told, then there’s only one, the first 35 pages where we get to go ‘Yeah, you may have been on this sermon but you’ve never been through it with me.’ This is where I get to introduce you to a new person going through this before the conflict comes and we’re off on the story. So in [True Detective] I get a 150-page first act to indulge in and sit there and simmer and just try and keep the lid on before Rustin Cohle goes off. And I learned a lot of patience because I actually, a month into this, I was going like ‘I think what I’m doing could be really boring.’ And I was like, no, just hold on, hold on. There’s a time, it’s coming up. And I learned patience in that. But first acts, have you never thought of it like that?
McConaughey claims that “[t]he actor’s favourite part is the first act.” I think this philosophy applies to writers, too. When you’re a studio head or producer with money to lose, it’s easy to put obsession, patience and devotion to the craft aside. But this is clearly a mistake. As a society, we’re increasingly refusing to sit with our boredom and it’s bleeding into our art.
The best part of the writing process is the research and planning stage. Building worlds and characters and scenes. If McConaughey represents the majority of actors, the best part of playing a character is personalizing your performance using the resources you have available to you (the script, the director, your fellow performers, etc.) This part of creation may sound like boring paperwork to most, but this stage and how much passion is put into it seems to make or break the final product, and it shows. Why else are we continually hearing, ‘Ugh, they don’t make shows/movies like this anymore!’?
Muanza’s Media Recommendations
After all this talk about Act 1s and the patience it teaches you, I thought it only made sense to list some assigned reading watching. Here’s a some media that I feel had excellent Act 1s:
It also has the best theme song ever in the world. No joke.
That first episode…need I say more?
Fun Fact: Grant Gustin and I have the same birthday teheheheehe
Season 1 is like deadass widely recognized as one of the best-written TV seasons’s ever.
Lorddddddddd. I still dream about her…
The 9-episode season is broken into 3 parts. Part One is crazyy.
The show, not the movie.
Bring Back Act 1s!
In a perfect world, Timothée Chalamet would’ve said the right thing in response to McConaughey and, rather than hilarious ballet and opera house promotional campaigns, film studios would be scrambling to fix up their scripts and quickly. Things would be changing behind the scenes so that the final years of the 2020s bring us a wave of well-crafted stories that aren’t scared to wait 25 pages before throwing you into the conflict. In this world, who knows when studios will be ready to give us the great movies they already have the talent and resources to create. Maybe this piece is a step in the right direction, though.
As audiences, I feel like we’re already demanding more from studios. Now, all that’s left is for them to deliver.