By Gill Pringle
“Charlize and I have said for the last five hours that we haven’t made much that our kids can watch for a long time,” Matthew McConaughey says during a long day of press for the new animated film, Kubo And The Two Strings, in which he and co-star Charlize Theron, provide the voices for, respectively, a warrior beetle and a talking monkey, who offer help and support for the eponymous young hero, setting out an epic journey across ancient Japan.
“I took my family to go see it, but I didn’t tell them exactly what I was doing or how I was a part of it, and we watched it,” father-of-three, McConaughey, explains. “My wife was sitting next to me, and my son was sitting to the right of me and my daughter was there too. When my character first came up, she leaned over and goes, ‘Papa, papa, that beetle sounds a lot like you!’ I shrugged it off. It came up to the second scene, and she was like, ‘Papa, I’m telling you that beetle sounds like you!’ So when the movie was over, she was like, ‘Was that you?’ I told her yes, and I was hot stuff around the house for the next week!”
At the time of the press day, however, Charlize Theron’s children hadn’t been so lucky. “The day that I saw it was actually my son’s first day back at school, so I felt wrong to pull him out to come and see the film,” the actress explains. “But I’m hopefully going to show it to him in a couple of weeks. He’s seen the trailer several times. He really loves the trailer, and he put it together. It was a very similar experience to Matthew. He was like, ‘Mom, that sounds like you.’ I did the same thing because I didn’t want to bust it. I wanted him to experience the film for what it is. I went, ‘Really?’ and he goes, ‘Mom?’ Then he was very concerned that the world didn’t know that I wasn’t really a monkey. He was like, ‘Mom, you have to tell them that you’re not really a monkey.’ That was really his only concern. I’m really excited for him to see it. He knows so much about it. [Director] Travis [Knight] is so tired of me talking about my little boy. Every day that I was in recording, this was really something that I wanted to do for him. I thought of him constantly while I was making this, and I’m really excited for him to see it.”
And what does Matthew McConaughey hope that his kids will get out of the film? “We’ve had a lot of talks about courage and overcoming your fears along the way, and that’s one of the themes of this story,” the actor replies. “You’ve got to fight and you’ve got to have a lot of courage to write the third act of your own story. You get your happy ending, and it may not be exactly what you thought it was going to be, but usually if you get to the nut of it, the truth of it, that’s a lot happier than not finishing the story at all. Sometimes act two is kind of a son of a gun, but it encourages you. You’ve got to fight for your third act.”
Kubo And The Two Strings is in cinemas now. Click through for our review of the film, and our interview with director, Travis Knight.
