Matthew David McConaughey ( mə-KON-ə-hay; born November 4, 1969) is an American actor. He achieved his breakthrough with a supporting performance in the coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confused (1993). After a number of supporting roles, his first success as a leading man came in the legal drama A Time to Kill (1996). His career progressed with lead roles in the science fiction film Contact (1997), the historical drama Amistad (1997), the war film U-571 (2000), and the epic science fiction film Interstellar (2014).
In the 2000s, McConaughey became known for starring in romantic comedies, including The Wedding Planner (2001), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), Failure to Launch (2006), Fool's Gold (2008), and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009), establishing him as a sex symbol. In 2011, after a two-year hiatus from film acting, McConaughey began to appear in more dramatic roles, beginning with the legal drama The Lincoln Lawyer. In 2012, he gained wider praise for his roles as a stripper in Magic Mike and a fugitive in Mud.
McConaughey's portrayal of Ron Woodroof, a cowboy diagnosed with AIDS, in the biopic Dallas Buyers Club (2013) earned him widespread critical acclaim and numerous accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Actor. He followed it with a supporting role in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and a starring role as Rust Cohle in the first season of HBO's crime anthology series True Detective (2014), for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. His subsequent film roles include starring in Interstellar (2014) and The Gentlemen (2019), as well as voice work in Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), Sing (2016), and Sing 2 (2021).
Matthew David McConaughey was born on November 4, 1969, in Uvalde, Texas. He has Irish heritage, particularly from the County Cavan/County Monaghan area. His mother, Mary Kathleen (née McCabe), a published author and a former kindergarten teacher, was from Trenton, New Jersey. His father, James Donald McConaughey, also had Irish roots. He was born in Mississippi in 1929 and raised in Louisiana where he ran an oil pipe supply business; he played for the Kentucky Wildcats and the Houston Cougars college football teams. Jim was selected by the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League (NFL) in the 27th round of the 1953 NFL draft. He was released before the season began and never played an official league game in the NFL. McConaughey's parents married each other three times, having divorced each other twice. He has two older brothers, Michael and Patrick (who was adopted). Michael, nicknamed "Rooster", is a millionaire who starred in the CNBC docu-series West Texas Investors Club. The family were Methodists. He is a relative of Confederate brigadier general Dandridge McRae.
McConaughey moved to Longview, Texas in 1980 and later attended Longview High School. In 1988, he went to Australia thinking he would be attending a high school in Sydney. Instead he lived in Warnervale, New South Wales for a year while he went to Gorokan High School (he was a Rotary Youth Exchange student) and worked as an assistant for an attorney and as a bank teller for ANZ. During this time in Australia and for the next 10 years he seriously considered becoming a monk. A friend of his who was a monk told McConaughey that he was not here to be a monk, that he was meant to be "a communicator" and "a storyteller".
McConaughey attended the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), where he joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. He began in the fall of 1989 and graduated in the spring of 1993 with a Bachelor of Science in Radio-Television-Film. His original plan changed as he had wanted to attend Southern Methodist University until one of his brothers told him that private-school tuition would have been a burden on the family's finances. He had planned to attend law school after graduation from college but discovered he did not have any interest in becoming a lawyer.
Early 1990s–2000: Career beginnings
In the early 1990s, McConaughey began working in television commercials. In 1992, he was cast as the boyfriend in the music video for "Walkaway Joe", a song by Trisha Yearwood featuring Don Henley. Also that year, he acted in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
Bob Balaban's My Boyfriend's Back premiered on August 6, 1993, where McConaughey made his first big screen appearance as ''Guy 2''. On September 24, Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused premiered. McConaughey played Wooderson in a large ensemble cast of actors who would later become stars. He was not originally cast in the film, as the role of Wooderson was originally small and meant to be cast locally for budget purposes. At the time of casting, he was a film student at the University of Texas in Austin and went out with his girlfriend to the Hyatt hotel bar. He approached casting director Don Phillips. Phillips recalls, "The bartender says to him, 'See that guy down there? That's Don Phillips. He cast Sean Penn in Fast Times.' And Matthew goes, 'I'm gonna go down and talk to this guy.'" Phillips also recalls that Linklater didn't like McConaughey at first "because he was too handsome". During production, another character named Pickford was meant to be a larger role. Due to the behavior of the actor playing Pickford with other cast members, his screen time was cut in favor of McConaughey's character, Wooderson. Linklater recalled "There was another actor who was kind of the opposite [of McConaughey]. He wasn't really getting along with everybody. I could tell the actors weren't responding to him." Much of the Wooderson role was improvised or written on the spot. Dazed and Confused was released on September 24, 1993, in 183 theaters, grossing $918,127 on its opening weekend. It went on to make $7.9 million in North America. The film received positive reviews from critics. The film generally gets favorable reviews. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 92% approval rating. The website's critical consensus reads: "Featuring an excellent ensemble cast, a precise feel for the 1970s, and a killer soundtrack, Dazed and Confused is a funny, affectionate, and clear-eyed look at high school life." In her review for The Austin Chronicle, Marjorie Baumgarten gave particular praise to Matthew McConaughey's performance: "He is a character we're all too familiar with in the movies, but McConaughey nails this guy without a hint of condescension or whimsy, claiming this character for all time as his own".
In 1994, McConaughey acted in Angels in the Outfield, The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Daniel Johnston's music video "Life in Vain". McConaughey acted in Herbert Ross' Boys on the Side, which premiered on February 3, 1995. That year he also acted in a crime thriller, Brian Cox's Scorpion Spring. John Sayles' Lone Star (1996) is a neo-Western mystery film set in a small town in South Texas. McConaughey is in an ensemble cast that features Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, and Elizabeth Peña. McConaughey played the lawyer Jake Brigance in Joel Schumacher's A Time to Kill which premiered July 24. The film is based on the John Grisham courtroom crime novel of the same name. In an ensemble piece McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, and Kevin Spacey share the top billing. On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 67%. The critics' consensus reads: "Overlong and superficial, A Time to Kill nonetheless succeeds on the strength of its skillful craftsmanship and top-notch performances". In the U.S. it reached number one during its first two weeks and grossed over $108 million domestically, and an additional $43,500,000 was made internationally. At the MTV Movie Awards, McConaughey won Best Breakthrough Performance. Larger Than Life is a road comedy film starring Bill Murray and directed by Howard Franklin; McConaughey played a supporting role. Also that year he acted in Glory Daze. McConaughey starred in the science fiction film Contact (1997), directed by Robert Zemeckis, an adaptation of Carl Sagan's 1985 novel of the same name; Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan wrote the story outline for the film. In the film Jodie Foster portrays the film's protagonist. Also that year, McConaughey starred as then-lawyer Roger Sherman Baldwin in Steven Spielberg's Amistad.