Can we talk about Matthew McConaughey for a second? I mean, what is this guy’s deal, anyway? He was fine in A Time to Kill, workmanlike but not quite equal to Jodie Foster in Contact, mostly an afterthought in the ensemble cast of Thirteen Conversations about One Thing—and other than that, he seemed to spend most of his career in slick, commercial crap like EdTV, Sahara, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Failure to Launch.

But this weekend, his new film Dallas Buyers Club is opening, and reviews are rapturous. McConaughey’s turn as a homophobic Texan who contracts AIDS and becomes an unlikely advocate for the LGBT community seems, even from the trailer, to be a career-making one. Dana Stevens, in her review for Slate, says “he’s so fine in this role it’s hard to shake a sense that he’s been prepping for it his whole career.”

McConaughey’s transition from rom-com purgatory to indie excellence has been so quick—it started somewhere around The Lincoln Lawyer and continued through Bernie, Magic Mike, and Mud—that the popular consciousness still has him filed away as a joke, a caricature of terminally laid-back bro-ified douchitude. This morning, Vulture ran, alongside David Edelstein’s rave of Buyer’s Club, a supercut of other celebrities impersonating McConaughey.

There’s a reason for this, and it’s the most astonishing thing about McConaughey’s transition from joke to indie darling—that is, the man somehow managed to turn his fortunes around not by abandoning the characteristics that made him so laughable, but by leaning into them.

Interpretations of where and when this began will vary, but I locate the tipping point somewhere around 2008’s Tropic Thunder. In that film, McConaughey played a talent agent with a dude-bro’s love for his clients and absolutely zero going on upstairs—named, tellingly, Rick Peck. The dude was literally a dick. When his client, the also hilariously named Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) gave Peck a call, the caller ID on his cell phone read “Tuggernuts”; part of the laugh coming from that scene has to be the fact that when Matthew McConaughey gets a call from Ben Stiller in real life, you’ve got to think that the caller ID reads “Stillernuts.”

McConaughey wasn’t home free after Tropic Thunder, of course—he still had the widely-panned Ghosts of Girlfriends Past ahead of him—but in the films of his indie prestige period, he’s followed the same pattern. In each, he’s played a smooth, smarmy, self-regarding, and slightly dim character that bears more than a passing resemblance to the man himself. It’s more than self-mockery; through these characters, McConaughey is interrogating his persona and transforming what once appeared to be shallowness into deep pathos.

It’s odd, though perhaps inevitable, that the fictional world of a film and the real-life world of actors’ and director’s personas aren’t in fact hermetically sealed but quite porous, allowing meanings to bleed from one into the other. As a result, a star’s most successful role is often the one that takes on their real-life persona directly, either burnishing it or, in McConaughey’s case, puncturing it. I’m reminded of other stars—Tom Cruise in Magnolia for instance, playing a sex guru whose insane performance of virile masculinity masks a deep insecurity; or Alec Baldwin, whose best role is unquestionably 30 Rock‘s comically self-regarding Jack Donaghy.

Speaking of Jack, he once told Liz Lemon about a time when he got out of a tight spot not by climbing out—but by going deeper into the crevasse. When it comes to actors dealing with a negative public image, the same advice might be applied: the way out is not up, but through.