Speaker
Matthew McConaughey
25 bits across the podcasts they've appeared on
McConaughey turned down a $14.5 million rom-com offer during his deliberate 20-month hiatus from Hollywood to pursue more serious dramatic roles.
McConaughey went 20 months without work to escape rom-com typecasting, becoming so irrelevant his agent hadn't heard his name mentioned in over two months.
McConaughey was paid $330 a day on Dazed & Confused, compared to his best night waitressing at a catfish restaurant of $73.
The iconic 'Alright, alright, alright' line was improvised from three affirmations McConaughey made about his character's loves — his car, rock & roll, and getting high — on the way to pursue the fourth: picking up girls.
McConaughey's mother, 92 years old, has beaten two types of cancer largely on aspirin, which McConaughey attributes to her absolute commitment to denial and a refusal to acknowledge illness.
The Wooderson character in Dazed & Confused originally consisted of only 3 scenes and 3 marked lines in the script left by casting director Don Phillips.
McConaughey's father passed away just five days into the filming of Dazed & Confused, which McConaughey says gave him real courage and sobriety to face the world.
After becoming famous from A Time to Kill, McConaughey took a 22-day solo backpacking trip to Peru to test his character among strangers who had no idea who he was.
McConaughey and wife Camila have three children aged 16, 14, and 11, all of whom travel together as a family unit — a condition Camila set before they started having children.
At the peak of McConaughey's rom-com era, films were budgeted at $30–35 million — low enough to be profitable for studios even without blockbuster numbers.
McConaughey and director Richard Linklater developed the idea that humor should be the default emotional response when you don't know how to react — coined in a conversation about 12 years before the recording.
