Matthew McConaughey’s brother inspired one of his greatest characters
Although the 2010s gave us Matthew McConaughey‘s most significant acting work, with projects such as Interstellar, True Detective, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Lincoln Lawyer and Dallas Buyer’s Club proving the Texan actor’s worthy stature, sometimes it’s hard to look beyond his first ever feature film role.
That came in from of Richard Linklater’s 1993 coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confused, in which McConaughey featured as David Wooderson, a long-graduated-from-high-school young man who still likes to live a life of leisure, hanging out down the pool bar and taking life easy. McConaughey’s deliverance of the line “alright, alright, alright,” remains one of his most iconic moments on screen.
Interestingly, the inspiration for Wooderson actually came from closer to home than many might imagine. When he appeared on the Sibling Revelry podcast with Kate and Oliver Hudson, McConaughey explained that he actually based his entire Wooderson character on his older brother, Pat, whom McConaughey had idolised throughout his youth.
The inspiration explanation comes with a lovely anecdote about young McConaughey covering his brother’s back from his parents. “Y’all know this as actors,” McConaughey began. “Sometimes you study details of a character, and other times it’s just an impression.”
“That character was based on a specific day when I was about ten years old,” the actor continued. “Mom and I were going to pick up my brother Pat after school. His car had broken down, so we were supposed to pick him up in the station wagon, and he wasn’t where we were supposed to meet him.”
What McConaughey saw next would not only inspire the character from his first feature film but also, in turn, the rest of his career. He caught a vision of Pat that perfectly portrayed the ultra-cool carefree demeanour of McConaughey’s future character in Linklater’s movie.
“So as we’re slowly driving through campus, I’m in the backseat looking out the back window,” he went on. “I see this image of a guy in shadow, leaning against the wall in the smoking section with one boot heel kicked up on the wall, the light shining through, the bent knee, leaning back, kind of a lazy longhand. I was like, ‘whoa’. He was like nine feet tall, the coolest thing in the world, and it was my brother Pat.”
Of course, Pat was not meant to be smoking, so McConaughey did what any good little brother would do and pretended not to have seen it. He finished the tale: “I stopped because I was like, ‘Oh, if I say his name, Mom turns around, he’s going to get his butt whooped for smoking’. So I didn’t say anything. We just kept driving, but that image of who I thought my brother was through my ten-year-old eyes when he was that much of an icon was who I based Wooderson on.”
