Matthew McConaughey's True Vocation?

Matthew McConaughey has played characters with a lot of legal hustle – from Jake Brigance in A Time to Kill to his latest, Mickey Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer, both of whom have good old-fashioned swagger, and a heck of a knowledge of legal code. It almost makes you wonder – could McConaughey have missed his true vocation, to become a lawyer?

When asked that, he smiled. “My plan when I was going into college was to do that. That was my plan.”

But, perhaps more typical of some of his slacker characters than his harder-working ones, the actor rethought his plan once he realized how much would be involved.

“I looked up one morning and noticed that to do what I wanted to do, there was going to be two more years of this school, and then four years of that school,” he said. “And so I said, ‘I’ll be 28 when I get out and start practicing the craft and start a career?’ And I was like, ‘No way, man! What about my twenties? There are things I’d like to say now, and things I want to try and do.’”

So McConaughey changed his course and started studying for a B.S. degree in radio-television-film production instead at the University of Texas, Austin. In between his junior and senior years, he met budding filmmaker Richard Linklater, who cast McConaughey in his first film role, as David Wooderson, the older guy still hanging out with high school students in Dazed and Confused. “And then you all know the story from there.”

Despite his change of heart, McConaughey said there’s a similarity between the two professions, which he discovered while researching his role in The Lincoln Lawyer (out March 18) by researching cases in federal court in Los Angeles.

“You see how these guys are performers,” he said. “Some are good, some of them not so good.”

In this film roles, McConaughey combined those elements to create Jake Brigance and Mickey Haller. Jake, he said, was “more innocent, more naïve, more ideological” than Haller. Haller, he said, represents “the sort of bottom-feeders in society,” and is less ideological. “He may still have some ideology about defending people who can’t defend themselves,” he said, “but he’s pretty much a pragmatist and understands how the system works. He understands that you got to know how the system works to make it work for you. So he bends his own rules. He plays it both sides of the law.”

McConaughey modeled Haller after the downtown Los Angeles lawyers he observed, “street smart, slick, wheeling and dealing, constantly on the move.”

“What I saw was these guys are movers and shakers,” he added. “Phone’s always ringing, someone’s at the door. They’re wheeling and dealing and papers are stacking up … and they’re always haggling. They’re saying, ‘Hey, I’ll do this for you if you do this for me.’ There was nothing formal about it. Deals are being made everywhere.”

Does he ever regret the switch he made in careers, the road not taken? McConaughey paused. “I’m glad I made that decision, to change.”