Matthew McConaughey talked his way into his first big role at a hotel bar
A film student from Texas walked up to a casting director over drinks, and a tiny part meant for a local extra grew into Wooderson in Dazed and Confused. Two decades later the same actor, long typecast in romantic comedies, won the Oscar for Best Actor.
Born in Uvalde, Texas, on November 4, 1969, McConaughey grew up in a family with Irish roots and an unusual domestic history: his parents married each other three times. His father, Jim, had been picked by the Green Bay Packers in the 1953 draft but was cut before playing a league game. In 1988 the son spent a year in Warnervale, New South Wales, as a Rotary exchange student, working as a bank teller and for an attorney, and for roughly a decade afterwards he seriously weighed becoming a monk.
He studied Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, graduating in 1993 after abandoning an earlier plan for law school. While still a student he met Don Phillips, who had cast Sean Penn in Fast Times, at the Hyatt bar. Richard Linklater reportedly found him too handsome at first, yet Wooderson expanded during the shoot, partly because another actor clashed with the cast, and much of the role was improvised.
Leading-man status arrived with A Time to Kill in 1996, where he played the lawyer Jake Brigance; it topped the US box office for two weeks and earned him an MTV award for breakthrough performance. Science fiction and history followed with Contact and Amistad, then a long run of romantic comedies such as The Wedding Planner that made him a sex symbol. People magazine named him its Sexiest Man Alive for 2005.
The turn came in 2011. After two years away from film acting he chose darker material, starting with The Lincoln Lawyer, then Mud, where he played a man on the run, and Magic Mike, as a stripper. Playing Ron Woodroof, a Texas cowboy living with AIDS, in Dallas Buyers Club brought the Academy Award for Best Actor, and his detective Rust Cohle in the first season of True Detective drew an Emmy nomination.
Source: Matthew McConaughey
