Matthew McConaughey has built a career on a chilled type of confidence: “Alright, alright, alright.”
His face grew grave. He stared at the camera. “It’s not coming. It’s here.”
“Don’t deny it,” McConaughey said in a recent conversation alongside actor Timothée Chalamet. “It’s not enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea that this is wrong. That’s not going to last.”
In light of that inevitability, his advice to creators was to “own yourself. Your voice, your likeness, whatever you’ve got—own yourself. So when it comes—not if it comes—no one can steal you.”
“My team and I want to know that when my voice or likeness is ever used, it’s because I approved and signed off on it,” he said in an earlier statement.
McConaughey says he believes artists can’t rely on moral outrage or future legislation alone.
“When it starts to trespass, you’ll at least have your own agency,” he said. “They’re going to have to come to you and ask, ‘Can I?’Or they’re going to breach, and then you’ll have the chance to say yes for this amount… or no.”
He’s also realistic about how pervasive the technology will become. In five or 10 years, he speculated, awards shows could even feature “Best AI Actor,” believing they could make a separate category for just AI actors.
Chalamet struck a similar but more abstract note, calling it a “dual responsibility” between established stars and younger artists. Those in power today must help keep the door open for human performers, he said, but it will ultimately fall to the younger generation to determine how AI is integrated into creative industries.
“The dreamer in me wants to enable a 19-year-old to produce something they couldn’t otherwise,” Chalamet said. But he also emphasized being “fiercely protective of actors and artisans.”
