Matthew's talent for trouble

Matthew McConaughey certainly scrubs up well. "It's good to be smart," he says, fixing a white rose in the buttonhole of his immaculate dark blue suit. The photographer tells him he looks like James Bond (he really does) and he says: "Now that's an idea. I'd love to play James Bond, man."

He'd have to stop saying "man" quite so frequently for this to work, of course. Plus he'd have to lose the fantastically cartoonish Texan drawl - but he's certainly got the raffish, playboy-in-Armani kind of look. While the pictures are being taken, he tells me about his stay in London and how, in the space of no time at all, he's discovered the capital's entire afterhours nightlife.

That's pretty impressive, I say. "Hey, I think I know this city better than you," he replies.

McConaughey is in London to promote his new movie, U-571. This is the tale of the US Navy's daring mission to capture the very first Enigma machine - the top-secret Nazi coding device - from a German submarine in 1942. McConaughey plays Lt Andrew Tyler, the firm-jawed hero who leads his men on to the Nazi sub, and then sees them through a series of terrifying underwater crises. From our side of the Atlantic, of course, this looks suspiciously like glory-stealing. It was, after all, the British Navy which captured the very first Engima machine from a German submarine, and a British officer, Lt Commander David Balme, who led the boarding party on to the sub, U-110, in 1941.

In his defence, the director of U-571, Jonathan Mostow, stresses the word "fictional" when talking about his movie. It is, he says, a composite of various real-life episodes which occurred during the Battle of the Atlantic, some of them involving the Americans. McConaughey, meanwhile, is the perfect diplomat - or, rather, he is very well-rehearsed in his answers.

"I can see how people could get mad," he says. "I can see how the British could get mad about it, but they should go see the movie. It's very obvious to me that it's a yarn. It's a seafarer's tale, a sub film, a hero's journey. It's good winning over evil. It's all of these things before it's specifically about who actually got their hands on the Engima first. I think that's pretty clear."

And, yes, it is - to an extent. U-571 is a very loud film, a thriller of sorts. The Enigma machine features as a plot device and no more. Lt Tyler's heroism exists less in capturing it than in managing his men and getting them out of scary situations. No one raises the Stars and Stripes; no one sings Dixie as they wrap the Enigma machine in oil-skin. Still, this won't stop a generation of teenage American movie-goers growing up in the full belief that their navy was responsible for the single most important intelligence coup of the Second World War. Then again, Mostow has the full backing of David Balme himself, who says simply: "Jonathan's goal was to make a compelling film, and he succeeded."

McConaughey is quite clear about his role in U-571. He wanted to play an action-hero, what he describes as a "week-day" character. "Here's how I divide it," he drawls. "There are weekend characters, like Ed in EdTV. They're the ordinary guys. And there are week-day characters like Lt Andrew Tyler, who make big, heavy decisions and have the world on their shoulders." Thus, Wooderson in Dazed and Confused is a "week-end" kind of guy, and the attorney Jack Brigance in McConaughey's breakthrough movie, the John Grisham adaptation A Time to Kill, is definitely "week-day". Willis Newton, my favourite McConaughey character from the underrated The Newton Boys, is surely a mix of the two: both ordinary bloke and extraordinary bank robber. But McConaughey's career isn't really planned with all the rigour this implies. When he went to college in his native Austin, Texas, he first studied law. But he became bored and switched to film school, and there, the story goes, director Richard Linklater discovered him sitting in the bar. Linklater instantly cast him in the zeitgeist-grabbing Dazed and Confused - still his favourite movie. Since then, McConaughey has steadily built a reputation as an actor of increasing versatility and ridiculous good looks. With his production company j k livin', he has also become a bit-part player on the broader Hollywood scene. "I average about eight months between films," he says. "And that's why I have the production company, 'cos if I get too many Saturdays in a row, I get in trouble - ah, I mean that in a funny way."

He's not kidding. You simply have to admire a man who, in October last year, got arrested for playing the bongos in his own house. The fact that he was naked, that the bongos were very loud, and that the Austin cops detected a "faint odour of marijuana" as they cuffed him, does not make this tale any less hilarious.

"I got a $50 fine for noise viola-tion," says McConaughey, now grinning like a shark. "You know everyone had a sense of humour about it. It's sort of like the perfect crime. No one got hurt. There's nothing to be embarrassed about."

Later he tells me: "We have a little too much time on our hands in America sometimes. And, erm, nothing gets through the cracks any more." He's talking about the people who complained when he called the Japanese "Japs" on a US chat show - an incident which provoked yet more headlines linking McConaughey with the word "trouble".

It's not a problem the classically un-PC James Bond would have had, you feel. And as McConaughey leaves the room, he leans over, grins again and says: "Let's get something started here. Why don't you say you asked about Bond and I refused to comment. Cos, ya know, I'd really love to play him."