A bee-keeping musician (Matthew McConaughey, left) tries to rekindle his relationship with his foster daughter (Angelina LookingGlass) in The Rivals of Amziah King. Elevation Pictures

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Matthew McConaughey hadn’t made a movie in five years when The Rivals of Amziah King came across his desk.

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Life had taken the Oscar winner in a different direction. He wrote his New York Times best-selling memoir, Greenlights, and a children’s book called Just Because. He voiced the dapper koala Buster Moon in Sing 2. But mostly, he just spent time away with his wife Camila Alves and their three kids.

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He’ll readily admit it didn’t feel like he’d been gone five years. But when filmmaker Andrew Patterson gave McConaughey the script for The Rivals of Amziah King, something clicked.

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“It was poetic,” McConaughey says with his signature drawl in a Zoom call from Austin, Texas. “The script was in an original place, space, time. It had its own language. It was a fable. It was mythical.”

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In the film, McConaughey plays a beekeeping musician who rekindles a long‑lost relationship with his foster daughter (Angelina Lookingglass). Their bond comes under threat when ruthless rivals target Amziah’s honey business.

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“I knew people like this. I’ve met them. I’ve spent time with them. I have some of them in me; I have some of Amziah in me,” McConaughey says.

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Patterson says the idea was born after he hatched a plot for a western.

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“The idea being, ‘What if a cowboy shot down the father of a Native young lady … and then she got up on a horse and went after them?’” he says.

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After the long layoff, McConaughey says the movie, which also features Kurt Russell as a shady power player in the honey game, reminded him how much he loves acting.

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“Every single time I go back to acting, after I haven’t acted in a while, I’m reminded how much I enjoy it,” he says, smiling.

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More than a decade ago, McConaughey stepped away from the rom-coms that made him a star to take risks in small, edgy films.

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He started that bid in earnest with an Oscar-winning turn in 2013’s Dallas Buyers Club and the McConaissance continued with his role as a philosophizing cop in the first season of True Detective and parts in The Wolf of Wall Street and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

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After filming Amziah, he shot The Lost Bus, which Apple released last year.

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Acting is like a holiday, he says. “It gives me a singular focus. To have a singular focus is extremely relaxing for me, even though it’s hard to do,” he smiles.

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“When you can get together with a director and a bunch of actors and a crew for a few months and that’s your only world, that’s a beautiful vacation to take,” he says.

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Below, McConaughey spoke more about his return, what he learned he missed about his craft and revealed the one musician he’s seen perform live that made him think, “That’s how it’s done.”