by Neil Daniels
Matthew had a good time in high school. He got As and was socially active and popular (though he has since admitted he was perhaps a touch emotionally extroverted). His good pal Rob Benlerph was very encouraging of Matthew’s talents and would have a lot to do with Matthew’s future vocation. Rob – who was a somewhat introverted teen – was the one friend who told Matthew that every Friday and Saturday night did not have to be about partying and meeting girls. So, as a result, Matthew partied on Fridays, but Saturdays were spent watching a movie and having a meal. This was when Matthew was introduced to films. Rob, who would later go to NYU, was writing scripts and teaching Matthew about storytelling. Rob suggested to Matthew that he should try to act and Matthew took the idea on board. Some of the films that Matthew liked at the time were Angel Heart, the Alan Parker film starring Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro, and Hud, directed by Martin Ritt and starring the late Paul Newman.
Another favourite film of his was King Kong, which has stayed with him ever since and has perhaps impacted his life more than any other feature. It’s odd that the highly derided 1976 version with Jessica Lange had such an impression on Matthew, but he absolutely loved it. ‘One of my favourite movies,’ McConaughey admitted to Elle’s Holly Milea. ‘When I was eight years old watchin’ that movie, I cried when they took King Kong and wouldn’t let him get together with Jessica Lange, because I think they could have worked it out.’
In 1988 aged nineteen, he lived for a year as a Rotary exchange student in Warnervale, New South Wales, Australia. Matthew’s first application was declined but then he met Noel Crocker, an Australian from Warnervale on the Central Coast, who was staying in Texas as part of the same exchange programme. Noel rang his dad Ray in Australia and asked him if there was anything he could do to help Matthew. Noel faxed him Matthew’s details and Ray then checked with Bill Symington, the Toukley Rotary President, who granted Matthew permission so long as he stayed with the Crockers (Ray, his wife Eileen and their son Noel) at their farm in Warnervale. Matthew was there two weeks later. He lived at the family farm for five months, during which time he attended Gorokan High School and helped Ray with his horses. He then went on to stay with Bill and Val Symington and their kids for six months before flying back to Texas.
Matthew moved to Australia because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do and his mother knew he loved travelling and that he wanted to explore the world. He fell in love with Australia, a foreign, almost unheard of land to many Americans. He explored the Central Coast and cities such as Brisbane. He would revisit the country many times in adulthood and even make a film there. He absorbed the culture, the people, the dialect, and of course, coming from sunny Texas, he loved the glorious weather. His trip to Australia also tripped a nerve in him for another reason – his love of travelling. One day, with enough money, he would journey to many different countries and partake in as many adventures as possible, often on his own.
Matthew is somewhat similar to a character in a Mark Twain novel or a Woody Guthrie song; a free spirit, someone who roams the country unchained of any tangles. Back in Texas, he had to concentrate on his studies and think about career plans. Going to college remains a huge source of pride and a great achievement for many lower middle class Americans, especially for those whose parents are less educated.
Asked by a fan for his fondest memories of Australia in Empire’s ‘Public Access Unseen’ interview feature, he responded: ‘Mmm, being out in the Bush. That was a really interesting year. I had a couple of different jobs, lived with different families. I’d say my most satisfying job was when I was a builder. I was a carpenter, with this guy I lived with called Bill. And we went out to just a derelict property and built that house from the ground up. The whole structure, and it was just really, really cool working on that, being able to see the before and after, and getting that gratification of building a small home, and then living with him and his family. He had five daughters and I’d never had sisters, so having sisters was very cool.’
Throughout his teenage years Matthew took on a series of menial and mundane jobs to get some cash together. Such tasks included washing dishes, including at the houses he lived in Down Under. By the time he moved back home it was time to get his head stuck in the study books.
In 1989 Matthew enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin College of Communication where he joined the Delta Tau Delta International Fraternity and lived at The Castilian residence hall.
He had somewhat disjointed ideas of what he wanted to do as a career. Originally, he wanted to become a lawyer (his family joked that he could get them out of trouble), a role he ended up playing in A Time to Kill, Amistad, The Lincoln Lawyer and Bernie. Law, however, wasn’t tickling his gut even though he had been on that career path from the age of fourteen.
‘I was headed towards law school,’ he admitted to The Film Stage’s Caitlin Martis, ‘and it wasn’t until the end of my sophomore year, right about that time when your general credits are up and your new ones aren’t really going to transfer if you change your course schedule. I was a little nervous about this idea of being a lawyer.’
But there was also another reason why he switched from law to film. He would have gone to SMU in Dallas to study law but as it’s a private school it would have cost his parents $16,000, whereas the University of Texas fees were $6,000. He was advised of the difference in outlays in a call from his middle brother, who also told him that the oil business wasn’t doing so great so his Pop would struggle to raise the finances to send him to Dallas.
Matthew didn’t want to miss out on his twenties, figuring he would be twenty-eight by the time he got out of school, and thus would not be able to do all the things young people can do. ‘I wanted to get out in my twenties and try and make some sort of imprint in society,’ McConaughey said to All Access Hollywood in 2011. ‘I didn’t have the patience or the want to go for another six years of just education before I wanted to try out and get my own experience.’
He loves to debate and grew interested in criminal defence and law. ‘When I was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one,’ he explained to Eric Eisenberg of Cinema Blend, ‘I really started to fall on the side of the defence and really felt like that I was purely built for it, and felt 100 per cent clear with being able to defend someone, if I knew they were innocent. That was a battle that I could not lose. There are certain things that you believe in and go, “That’s one of those places that I’ll find every bit of energy from the depths of my body and ancestry to fight, and win that fight.”’
Another option was to take the more traditional path of going into the oil and pipe business, following his father’s footsteps; after all, he was raised in a family that do nine to five jobs. You earn your pay and work your way up the ladder. Matthew had a change of mind after reading Og Mandino’s philosophical book, The Greatest Salesman in the World, which he saw on a coffee table at a friend’s house. Years later as a successful Hollywood actor, Matthew would keep numerous copies of the book around his house to give to friends, associates and journalists. ‘My first reaction was, “That’s a really aggressive, corporate-capitalistic title,”’ Matthew later admitted to Texas Monthly’s Jason Cohen in 1996, ‘but it was philosophy, it was self-improvement, and it was very, very practical.’
He told his dad during the sophomore final exams that he wanted to tell stories and was eager to go to film school. Pop told him not to be half-arsed and do it properly. ‘I remember that call to Mum and Dad and, after about a twenty-second pause, they were very supportive,’ Matthew confessed to the Independent’s Lesley O’Toole. ‘They liked the hope, the individuality I took.’
So Matthew told his dad he was going to Austin to study film rather than to Dallas to study law. He fitted right in with the students in Austin and it’s where he discovered his creative side, which enabled him to be artistic. He became the first member of his family to attempt to have a professional career in the arts, though his nearest and dearest had interests in literature and painting.
He learned early on to do something you give a damn about. Matthew is big on family, though, and takes a photograph of his family with him wherever he goes to remind him where is from.
CHAPTER TWO
BECOMING AN ACTOR
‘I think the core of innocence is healthy for anyone.’
Matthew McConaughey, Scotsman interview, 2012
Matthew McConaughey’s first break came rather easily. He didn’t set his mind on being a professional actor until he was twenty-one years old in 1991, though he’d been in a beer commercial for Miller Lite and a music video when he was nineteen while still at college learning about film. McConaughey played the male lead in that music video to Trisha Yearwood’s song ‘Walkway Joe’, released in November 1992, and featuring Eagles singer Don Henley on background vocals.
Matthew spoke to Terry Gross of the NPR show Fresh Air about his first forays into acting: ‘In film school I started [to act] – when I would be directing something or the photographer or even the AD [Assistant Director], I always found myself jumping on the other side of the camera and acting out what I meant, if I was trying to give direction or saying, “Well, let me do that.”’
McConaughey was actually happier that he’d got his driver’s license and saved up enough cash to buy his first truck than he was about the idea of being an actor. He had an Old Blue, a four-cylinder Dodge truck with a Ross Perot sticker on the bumper. McConaughey and his buddies, like many other college kids, would take her for a spin and pick up a pack of six beers and see what they could get up to. He had a thirst for exploration, which acting would help flourish.
‘In high school – I’d always driven a truck – I got a brand-new red sports car,’ he told People magazine some years later while talking about his most embarrassing pick-up line, or rather a bad move he made on a date. ‘I started getting out of my car and leaning against it. So I was trying to let the car do the work for me! I noticed about four months later I’m doing horrible with the women. I was like, “I gotta get rid of this sports car.” As soon as I got my truck back, I was back! I called it the curse of the red sports car.’
McConaughey simply fell into the profession. It wasn’t something he dreamed of; he wasn’t even sure if it was a practical way to earn a buck. He certainly didn’t know what to expect from acting. ‘…I have looked back at my diaries from back then,’ McConaughey admitted to Caitlin Martis of The Film Stage, ‘I was more interested in acting than I was consciously saying to myself. It was not something that was even in the vernacular of my dreams, I didn’t think that it was tangible enough.’
As luck, fortune and good timing would have it, Matthew McConaughey was soon cast as David Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, which was directed by fellow Texan Richard Linklater who was born in Houston and raised in Huntsville. The director would become a key person in McConaughey’s career. Linklater’s first film was the twelve minute long Frisbee Golf: The Movie, but his feature debut was It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, released in 1988 and shot on Super 8mm film. Linklater then managed to rake together $23,000 to make a film called Slacker, about a day in the life of a random collection of Austin bohemians. His next film was Dazed and Confused, a semi-autobiographical tale based on his Huntsville High School years and the people he met there.
McConaughey, a UT student between his junior and senior year, had met veteran casting director Don Phillips at the Hyatt Regency, a hotel bar, in Austin one Thursday night in the summer of 1992. It was McConaughey’s Lana Turner moment. (Turner was spotted, aged sixteen, at a Hollywood pharmacy by The Hollywood Reporter journalist William R. Wilkerson who referred the stunning Turner to agent Zeppo Marx. Turner was quickly cast in the 1937 film, They Won’t Forget, and the rest is Hollywood history.) Phillips had cast Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Forest Whitaker in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and was rounding up actors in Texas for Dazed and Confused.
‘…My girlfriend talked me into going out to have some drinks,’ McConaughey told Texas Monthly’s John Spong in 2003. ‘There was this bartender I knew from film school who worked at the Hyatt and would give us a discount, so we went there. And when we walk in, he’s there, and he goes, “Hey, man, the guy down at the end of the bar is in town producing a film.” So I went down and introduced myself. That was Don.’
They had a long night in the bar – which even included getting kicked out because they got so drunk. McConaughey’s girlfriend was long gone and the pair chatted for hours about girls, golf, movies and general life stuff. McConaughey asked about working as a production assistant on the project but was, instead, cast in the film. It was an unbelievable moment of good fortune. Fate, if you will.
The bouncer, a huge, muscular, red-shirted UT football player, escorted them out of the bar. McConaughey went back to Phillips’ room to continue talking. Matthew was furious that they had been kicked out – and even called the manager to demand an apology. Phillips asked him if he’d ever acted before and McConaughey told him about the one beer commercial and music video. Phillips told McConaughey he was in town casting Dazed and Confused and mentioned a character from the film called Wooderson whose persona is all about four things: rock ’n’ roll, weed, women and his car. It was too expensive to bring someone over from LA so McConaughey was invited to Phillips’ office the next day to read the script. There was a handwritten note on the pages with the character’s name, Dave Wooderson, and some of his lines written down.
‘The one that sent me off – and I was just like, “Who is this guy?” – is when they’re out front of the billiards joint and the ladies are walking by,’ McConaughey confessed to Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air, ‘Wooderson’s checking them out, and Wooderson’s like, “That’s what I like about those high school girls, man; I get older, but they stay the same age.” That was the piece for Wooderson that I was like, “That’s not a line, that’s his being. That’s his philosophy. He has it figured out. He’s not commentating.”’
McConaughey got the job and received $300 a day. The director, however, didn’t think McConaughey was the right man for the job when he first met him. ‘I thought he was too good-looking,’ Linklater confessed to Texas Monthly’s John Spong in 2003. ‘Matthew looked like he’d do fine with college girls; but I needed Wooderson to be a little creepier. But Matthew just sunk into character. His eyes shut to little quarter slots, and he said, “Hey, man, you got a joint?” He just became that guy. I thought, “Okay, don’t cut your hair. Can you grow a beard and a mustache?”’
A coming of age drama, Dazed and Confused features an ensemble cast that includes Renée Zellweger, Jason London, Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, Cole Hauser, Parker Posey, Adam Goldberg, Joey Lauren Adams, Nicky Katt and Rory Cochrane. Many of these actors would become well-known Hollywood names in the years to come. The story follows various social teenage cliques during the last day of summer on 28 May 1976. The title of the film was taken from the Led Zeppelin song of the same name. It features a fantastic soundtrack of seventies hard rock with such artists as Rick Derringer, Foghat, Alice Cooper, Black Oak Arkansas, ZZ Top, Nazareth, Ted Nugent, The Runaways, Sweet, War, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Deep Purple, KISS and Black Sabbath. Around a sixth of the film’s $6.9 million budget was used on purchasing the rights for those bands’ songs.
McConaughey, despite his short onscreen time, stole the show with some groovy lines. He was perfect for the role. ‘Let’s face it,’ Phillips said in an interview on Cinema.com, ‘Matthew has three things that make a star: you’ve got to be smart, you’ve got to have talent, and the girls have got to want to go to bed with you. He scores on all counts but at the same time he has a natural cool and humility about him.’
Dazed and Confused became the American Graffiti and Fast Times at Ridgemont High for its generation. Younger fans, who enjoy That 70s Show, would also appreciate it, while those who grew up watching Happy Days would dig its nostalgia. It’s a wonderful and immensely entertaining film about a group of carefree kids who are naïve about the world and
unsure of what adulthood will bring.
The chance encounter with Phillips ended up with a cameo in Dazed and Confused, which was shot late one night at the Top Notch, a drive-in burger joint in Austin. And it went more than all right!
‘Actually, it’s, “All right, all right, all right.” It’s three “all rights”. Those were the first words I ever said on film, in Dazed and Confused,’ he told Will Harris of Bullz-Eye, ‘the very first time I was ever in front of the camera. Actually, I had heard lots of live tapes of Jim Morrison at a Doors concert, and there’s…I don’t remember what the album is or where the concert was, but between one of the songs, he goes, “all right, all right, all right, all right.” He says it four times, right? And I was in Dazed and Confused, and it’s my first scene, the first take, and my character was about to pull into the Top Notch to go try and pick up on the red-headed intellectual. And they said, “Action,” and I was really nervous, and I just went, “All right, all right, all right!” And it sort of became a lead-in to get me to relax, and it turned out to be Wooderson-esque, and it’s a line that’s stuck. So that’s pretty cool.’
Fans right up to the present day would repeat the line to him. He’d get it at ball games, in the shopping mall, anywhere he went. It’s pretty cool and he likes it. They were the first words he ever said on film so there is poignancy to it.
