Interstellar’s Matthew McConaughey Wanted New Super Bowl Ad to Trick Fans With Sequel Bait

The Super Bowl takes place on Sunday and with the highly anticipated showdown between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals comes another highly anticipated “event”: movie trailers and teasers along with the Super Bowl commercials that viewers look forward to each year. This year, Matthew McConaughey is starring in an ad for Salesforce, but on first glance, it looks like a spot for a sequel to the 2014 film Interstellar — and it turns out that similarity is deliberate. 

Speaking with Variety (via Slashfilm) McConaughey explained that he wanted viewers to briefly think that the advertisement was really a tease for Interstellar 2 — a film that doesn’t actually exist.

“I wanted this misdirect at the beginning,” McConaughey said. “I wanted it to o pen and look very serious and in space because we’re about to pull the rug out from under you. Some people are going to think this is going to be the trailer for ‘Interstellar 2.’”

Released in 2014, Interstellar is a science fiction film from Christopher Nolan in which McConaughey’s pilot, Coop, is part of a mission to find a planet in the far reaches of space for humanity to survive on as Earth has become growingly in hospitable due to crop blights. The film was well-received with largely positive reviews and did well at the box office with a worldwide box office of more than $677 million. Fans of the film have wondered since its release if there would be a sequel, though sequel has ever been announced. As for how the Salesforce ad prompts thoughts of an Interstellar sequel, the ad opens with the cosmos, strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (easily recognizable from 2001: A Space Odyssey,) and McConaughey in a spacesuit all before the actor begins to descend in a hot air balloon and encourages people to focus more on what’s right in front of them. You can check out the advertisement for yourself above.

“Hope they go, ‘Look, what McConaughey and Salesforce is saying, is there is a problem in society today. Our relationship with each other, our relationship with the environment is fragile, man. We got a lack of trust, we got a lack of fairness. We got a lack of sustainable innovations. We have a lack of values,’” McConaughey said. “A lot of us are looking to escape and get the hell out of here or maybe look the other way. You know what? They’re right! But we can look around at our earthly challenges and look those in the eye and say, ‘Let’s handle this and restore what we got going on here. We’re not ready to quit.’ Hopefully, businesses will see this and are urged and nudged to make a commitment to making life here on Earth more fair, equal, and sustainable.”

What do you think of McConaughey’s Salesforce ad? Do you wish it were really for “Interstellar 2”? Let us know in the comments.