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Matthew McConaughey is an attractive man—the sexiest man alive even—and he has perhaps never used his handsomeness to greater effect than in HBO's new show True Detective.
The new, wonderful, devastatingly creepy HBO show tells the story of two detectives, Rust Cohle (McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson), over an extended timeline. In the first three episodes the show jumps back and forth between the 1990s, when Cohle and Hart are investigating a disturbing murder, and the present day, when the two are telling the story of that murder to two other investigators.
McConaughey, in a way, is an actor who's always kept an element of himself in every part he plays. He has that voice—that Dazed and Confused "alright alright alright" drawl; the little whistle that comes at the end of some his words—that will stay with him no matter who he is embodying. Still, McConaughey's mid-career transformation has had a lot to do with how we perceive his looks. In Magic Mike, he made his buffness part of the parody. Sure, he was attractive in that movie, but he was also, purposefully, deeply silly. In Mud he transformed himself into a Boo Radley figure, his tooth chipped and his face coated in a layer of grime. For Dallas Buyers Club, the role that could win him an Oscar if Liza Minnelli has anything to say about it, he made himself unfathomably skinny and sickly in the role of an AIDS patient.