Friends, colleagues, potential siblings: the offbeat brotherhood of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey
Even before they met, Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey always gave off the impression that they’d be fast friends if they ever crossed paths. That is exactly what happened when one of Hollywood’s most fascinating bromances was born.
Despite being a pair of the industry’s most famously affable Texan natives who seemed like the sort of actors anybody would love to sit down and have a beer – or partake in another kind of substance – with, they didn’t meet for the first time until they were both cast in Ron Howard’s 1999 satirical comedy EDtv. Of course, it was somewhat unfairly tarred with the denigrating brush of not being The Truman Show.
They reunited on-screen in the 2008 comedy Surfer, Dude and the first season of HBO’s True Detective, a pair of projects that couldn’t be more different. The former is an expectedly laidback romp, while the other is one of modern television’s greatest-ever seasons, earning each of them Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy nominations for ‘Best Actor’.
Harrelson referred to McConaughey as “my weed guy” during his Saturday Night Live hosting stint, and he was invited to take part in the latter’s ‘friendship tour’ that saw him set off across France on an adventure with Chris Rock and Bono. Their respective sets of children refer to the other as ‘Uncle Woody’ and ‘Uncle Matthew’, with the pair becoming so inseparable that the Academy Award winner admitted: “Where I start and where he ends, and where he starts and I end, has always been like a murky line.”
They’ve even toyed with the idea of doing a buddy comedy together, with McConaughey revealing how “people get around us for five minutes, and they go, ‘We’ve got to get these two in something where they can play off each other.'” True Detective was definitely that in an entirely different way, but the symbiotic bond between the two popular stars ended up becoming stranger than fiction.
Two pot-smoking Texans who became Hollywood mainstays striking up a bond that spans decades and finds them embedded within each other’s families is hardly out of the ordinary, but things got weird when the pair outlined how they might actually be biologically related. Strange enough, given the paths they followed, but even stranger knowing Harrelson’s father was famously a convicted hitman who once claimed responsibility for the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Harrelson had an understandably complicated relationship with his father, while McConaughey experienced a lengthy period of estrangement from his mother after discovering she regularly leaked details of his private life to the press. This adds yet another odd layer to an on-and-off-screen partnership that’s continued for over a quarter of a century and may have been enshrined in their DNA since the very beginning.
Harrelson did confirm to Esquire that McConaughey’s mother “did have a relationship with my father for a relatively short period of time that coincided with the time that his father and mother were on sabbatical, and with the time of Matthew’s – let’s say – origination.” Still, they haven’t opted to follow through on proving it beyond all doubt.
It is probably the right move, in all honesty, because best friends of 25+ years suddenly discovering they’ve secretly been brothers the whole time when they’re middle-aged is incredibly bizarre, even for Tinseltown. They were quite content hitting the town, blazing up their preferred herbal remedy, becoming one big happy family, and occasionally sharing the screen without that knowledge, but a sibling relationship is something altogether different that could potentially drive a wedge between the easy-going icons because some life-changing mysteries are better off unanswered.
