Matthew McConaughey Turned Down the MCU for This Stephen King Flop

1 week ago 14

Published Feb 15, 2026, 5:23 PM EST

Sam Barsanti has written about pop-culture for 10 years, and his work has appeared at The A.V. Club, Primetimer, IGN, and Collider. He has also contributed to the popular daily Hustle newsletter, which covers tech and startup news.

He'll happily talk to anyone about comic book movies (he thinks the MCU peaked with Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and giant robots (he thinks some of the Transformers movies are good), and he canonically exists in The CW's "Arrowverse" series of superhero shows.

Sam is also a published poet and horror writer, and his fiction work has appeared on The No Sleep Podcast.

Hindsight is 20/20, and what seemed like the wiser choice at the time isn’t always the one seems correct when you look back. It’s a universal human experience, one shared by regular people and famous people alike. Just ask Matthew McConaughey, whose decision to turn down a role in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 seemed like such a good idea at the time.

McConaughey likely would’ve played Ego, Star-Lord’s dad, who was ultimately played by Kurt Russell in the movie (and in subsequent What If…? cameos that McConaughey likely wouldn’t have been as game for). More importantly, though, it would’ve introduced him into the canon of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which he has managed to avoid so far — if you don’t count him providing the voice of the cowboy Deadpool in Deadpool & Wolverine. As a matter of fact, he’s one of only a few big-name actors who has never been in any superhero movie or any Star Wars movie, and now it seems like he should just keep that up.

Why Did Matthew McConaughey Turn Down the MCU?

We actually don’t know how close McConaughey got to playing Ego, but we do know what he chose to make instead: Niklaj Arcel’s disastrous adaptation of The Dark Tower, Stephen King’s sprawling, genre-defying sci-fi/horror/Western saga. McConaughey played The Man in Black, a.k.a. Walter, a.k.a. Randall Flagg, the overarching villain of a whole bunch of Stephen King stories (most famously The Stand), and to this day it remains frustratingly good casting. (As does the casting of Walter’s nemesis, the heroic gunslinger Roland Deschain, who was played by Idris Elba in the movie.)

But it’s hard to blame McConaughey for making the choice he did, because it does make sense on paper. Why be yet another famous person in a Marvel movie when you could be the guy playing this big important character in a movie that could’ve/should’ve spawned some sequels? McConaughey laid it out nicely back in 2017:

I like Guardians of the Galaxy, but what I saw was ‘It’s successful, and now we’ve got room to make a colorful part for another big-name actor.’ I’d feel like an amendment. The Dark Tower script was well written, I like the director and his take on it, and I can be the creator, the author of the Man in Black — a.k.a. the Devil — in my version of this Stephen King novel.

It’s a little reductive to call Walter “the Devil,” but that is the basic idea (especially when he’s using the Randall Flagg persona, which is a little more theatrically evil than Walter/The Man In Black). McConaughey went on to say that he played the character “as if I were the Devil having a good time, getting turned on by exposing human hypocrisies wherever he finds them.” And that’s not a bad take! It seems like he knew what he was doing, and it seems like picking the character that he could bring something to was a better choice than just doing “Matthew McConaughey is Star-Lord’s dad.”

Unfortunately, the Dark Tower movie ended up being awful, with just 16 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (and an unbelievably generous 44 percent from users). It’s not McConaughey’s fault at all, really, but the fact that the movie tried to condense seven dense, weird books into just one, not-so-weird movie. Did he make the right choice? Well, he’s still a rich and famous actor, so… probably, yeah.