Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera and Jamie Lee Curtis talk tense wildfire thriller 'The Lost Bus'

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Five years after his last starring role toplining Guy Ritchie’s crime drama The Gentlemen, Matthew McConaughey admits he had forgotten how fun acting could be.

“You reminded me,” the Oscar winner says, nodding at America Ferrera, his co-star in The Lost Bus, a new drama Apple will release into theatres on Sept. 19 before it makes its streaming debut on Apple TV+ on Oct. 3.

“America was reminding me that I didn’t realize how much I missed acting until I did it again,” the father of three tells Postmedia in an interview at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

A regular fixture on the rom-com scene in the early aughts, McConaughey reinvented himself a decade ago with meatier dramatic roles. He started that bid in earnest with an Oscar-winning turn in 2013’s Dallas Buyers Club and the McConaissance continued with parts in The Wolf of Wall Street and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

In recent years, McConaughey had eased back on his work in front of the camera, releasing his bestselling memoir Greenlights and the children’s book Just Because.

The True Detective star, 55, announced that he will publish a new book, Poems & Prayers, this fall.

But he was lured back to acting after producer Jamie Lee Curtis and director Paul Greengrass came to him with the character of Kevin McKay and the script for The Lost Bus.

In the movie, McConaughey plays real-life hero McKay, a school bus driver struggling with his own personal issues at home, who was called in to help rescue 22 children during the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California.

Thanks to the quick-thinking of McKay and schoolteacher Mary Ludwig (played by Ferrera), all the kids survived what would become the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. 

“I was immediately taken with the story and the character,” said McConaughey, whose son Levi, 17, and mom, Kay, also appear in the film.

Ferrera, 41, said she was drawn to the role because it showed two people becoming the best versions of themselves under extraordinary circumstances.

Curtis, 66, said she wanted to make the movie after reading about author Lizzie Johnson’s 2021 book, Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, in the newspaper.

“This is one of those moments that you never forget in your life. I was at home and I was reading the Washington Post and there was a review of the book Paradise, by Lizzie Johnson,” Curtis recalls. “It was about her time embedded with the people of Paradise, California, and about the Camp Fire in 2018, and there was a sidebar about Kevin McKay, the school bus driver who volunteered to go pick up 22 kids along with the schoolteacher Mary Ludwig and then for eight hours, no one knew what had happened to them. I remember saying to my husband, ‘That’s the movie.'”

Curtis called fellow producer Jason Blum immediately after hearing an interview with Johnson on NPR.

“I told him that I wanted to buy (the rights) to this book. I said to him, ‘I want to tell their story and I think it will be the most important thing either one of us ever does in the movie business.’ That’s how it began,” Curtis says.

Greengrass, who is known for directing several of the Jason Bourne films as well as other films based on real-life dramas, including the 9/11 biopic United 93 and his 2013 best-picture nominee, Captain Phillips, puts McConaughey and Ferrera into the thick of the action as smoke and flames engulf the bus.

“Once you have Paul Greengrass, you just know he’s a master. His background is in documentary filmmaking and he was able to give it this verisimilitude,” Curtis says.

“What struck me was how simple and human the story is: characters you can relate to, kids caught in the ticking clock of survival,” Greengrass says.

Ahead of the film’s world premiere at TIFF, McConaughey, Ferrera and Curtis discussed The Lost Bus and what the film has to say about heroism.

Matthew, it’s been a few years since we’ve seen you in front of the camera. What was it about The Lost Bus and Kevin McKay that made you excited to return to acting?

McConaughey: I had a two-hour phone call with Paul and we talked about how he works and how he wanted to create together and that excited me and then some … This movie was like being on a vacation and when I say it was like a vacation, I don’t mean it was like sitting under a palm tree with a pina colada. It was nice to have a singular focus. Having a singular obsession with a character in a movie and to act and have a reverence for this craft, and to be able to do that daily for three months was incredibly relaxing. All I had to worry about was my family and my role. That was a joy to do again.

America, what was it about playing Mary Ludwig that intrigued you?

Ferrera: I’m a huge Paul Greengrass fan. But I was drawn to the characters’ journeys … We see Mary getting to a place where she kind of has to reckon with the life she had been living (and ask herself) if she got another chance, what kind of life would she choose? I was really moved by Kevin and Mary’s trajectory towards one another. They start as complete strangers and they assume all kinds of things about each other … They don’t expect to have any kind of meaningful interaction on that bus. It’s, ’10 minutes and we’re done.’ They start in a place of indifference and then they experience and go through a transformative event in their lives. They meet in this place where they’re both stripped down. To me, it’s such a beautiful human parable. That’s all of us. We’re all going to meet the same truth in the end … I thought that was a really beautiful crux.

Jamie, what was it like to be putting this film together and then seeing the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles earlier this year?

Curtis: I live in Santa Monica and my husband and I were just able to move back eight months later after all the smoke damage, and we’re in an area that survived. I can’t tell you how many people I know who lost everything; their history and their family history. It made me terrified that it was happening again and yet very gratified that somehow we were going to make a movie that would show … the town of Paradise. It was decimated. But it’s still a thriving community. People moved back.

Matthew and America, does acting in a movie like this change your thoughts on heroism, courage or resilience? How do you come away from making a movie like this a changed person?

McConaughey: You know, there are so many definitions of heroism. People get asked that all the time: What is it? I don’t know if it’s even fair to call people heroes, but maybe it is. There are definitely heroic acts, and something that’s consistent with a heroic act is someone that runs towards a crisis instead of away from it. First responders — and I don’t mean just the people where that’s their title — I’m talking about normal people that find themselves in a circumstance that was not on their plan of the day. Something unimaginable just happened and they find themselves at a point where they have to make a decision. And then the will to survive that people have. We have a lot more than we give ourselves credit for in how far we’ll go to survive or be depended on. That can also give us a lot more will to survive. You find that out as a parent. What you would do because you have children who are depending on you. You’ll do a lot more than what you’d do for yourself.

Ferrera: For me, heroes have always been everyday people. Growing up my whole life, the people I viewed as heroes in my own life were a teacher or a parent … someone who stopped for a second to change someone else’s day out of sheer humanity or kindness. So I’ve always had the view of heroes being everyday people amongst us. To me, I was excited about the hero element of this story. Mary and Kevin didn’t choose to become heroes. It’s the moment that chose them and called on them to rise to the occasion whether they thought they could or not. That’s one of the things we’re always playing with in the hero fable; we know that there’s a part of that in us where we don’t know who we would be become under those circumstances, but we suspect, hope, wish … that we would make the right choice in those moments. These are two people who made incredibly selfless choices to protect other people’s children.

The Lost Bus opens in select theatres on Sept. 19, before streaming Oct. 3 on Apple TV+.

mdaniell@postmedia.com