Matthew's interview

Interview, August, 1996 by Graham Fuller

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: Uvalde, Texas, '69. It's a small town - twelve-thousand people - west of San Antonio. Mom and Pop were married for thirty-nine years. I got two older brothers, aged thirty-three and forty-three, both oil-pipe salesmen. We had a pretty conservative upbringing. You got your butt whopped for lying. It was church on Sundays. Pop had been a football player; he played under Paul "Bear" Bryant for the Green Bay Packers in the NFL in '53. He then drove trucks and ran a Texaco station, bringing the bread home. Mom was a teacher - she taught me in one of my kindergarten classes - and a professional mom. That's what she did everyday, raised us boys.

GF: When did you know you wanted to act?

MM: When I was around twenty-one, twenty-two. I never thought of the arts during my youth. I only saw one film in a theater before the age of ten - Orca [1977]. I was building tree houses and swimming in swimming holes out in the river and crawdad hunting and frog gigging. In 1980, I moved with Pop to a trailer park in Longview, east Texas. He and Mom were separated at the time, and he went up there to get work when the big Texas oil boom happened. Then Morn moved up a few months after we got settled and found a house to live in. Longview is in the Bible Belt: Baptist churches and barbecues. Two weeks out of high school, I went to Australia for a year on an exchange program and did eleven different jobs. When I came back, I went to the University of Texas at Austin, as a psychology-philosophy major planning to go on to law school and become a criminal lawyer. Then I had a change of heart. I didn't have any passion for law. I felt I had some good storytelling instincts and I wanted to translate some of this point of view right away, so I transferred to film school at Austin to learn directing. One night I was out having a drink with my girlfriend at the local Hyatt, and I met producer Don Phillips, who was in town casting Dazed and Confused [1993]. He asked me if I'd done any acting. I said not much, but he told me he thought there was a part I might be right for in the film. I went down and picked up the script and started working on the character, Wooderson. Went back, read for it with [writer/director] Rick [Linklater], and got the part.

GF: After Dazed and Confused, I remember you came by the Interview office to meet some of the editors. I was struck by how different you were from Wooderson. Whereas you're on this leading-man track now, you started your career in a character part. Wooderson's an apprentice good ol' boy going nowhere fast.

MM: If Wooderson came from anywhere, he came from the image of my middle brother. When I was eleven, he was eighteen, and he was the kind of athletic guy who hung out in the smoking section.

GF: Did your brother look like Wooderson?

MM: Not at all. I put a lot of hair spray and a tight T on. I was ready to get ugly. Wooderson was about rock 'n' roll, his car, women, and pot. If it didn't have to do with those four things, he wasn't interested.

GF: Did that first acting experience give you the bug?

MM: Yeah, I got the bug. I began to get real excited about the idea of the mind travel you experience when you get into the head of a character. And I began to notice that I was evidently a better actor than a director. Right after I graduated, I played the killer in Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1995], and that was a blast. Then I came out here to Hollywood.

GF: How did you go about positioning yourself for good roles?

MM: That's part of the chance thing that's just happened to me. Up until ten months ago, I was like, "I want to work, man. What's the role? I'll do it."

GF: It was obvious to me that the clean-cut cop you played In Boys on the Side [1995] was going to get you some mainstream attention.

MM: But that guy was such an Abe, such a righteous character. I was in a bit of a funk coming off of that, and I didn't work for eight or nine months. I wasn't doing very good in auditions. I was being a little too righteous myself, saying that if people don't get what I'm doing then they just don't get it. So then I went ahead and co-wrote, directed, and acted in an eighteen-minute short called The Rebel. It's about this guy who breaks arbitrary rules and thinks he's a big-time criminal. We shot it in five days and that brought back the recklessness to my acting when I went in for auditions. I was not as needy. I was much more like, "O.K., I did that, y'all got what'cha want? 'Cause I gotta go edit my film."

GF: It obviously worked, because you were cast in the lead role in Joel Schumacher's A Time to Kill. Your character, Jake Brigance, is a small-town Mississippi lawyer who defends a black man, Carl Lee Hailey [Samuel L. Jackson], who has shot dead, in the courtroom building itself, the two men who raped his little daughter. Apart from the amazing career opportunity the role gave you, what appealed to you about Jake?

MM: I like a character with some kind of code - a line not necessarily drawn in the sand, but a line drawn in your head and your heart. I like a character who walks that fine line between insanity and genius. As I see him, Jake's decided he wants to be a great lawyer, but he's in this small town, he's not doing that well, and he's married with a child; that responsibility - being a father - was the main difference between us that I had to come to terms with. I think that Jake grows up and becomes a man by the end of the film. He has a sense of fight and wrong about this case, but his impetus for taking it is that he wants to rock the boat and be a star. He says, "Hey man, I'm taking this. I'm the guy! If it makes me unpopular with people, fuck 'em." But he's not really taking [the case] for the pure reason that his client has a chance to be proven innocent. He discovers that through his journey. He comes to realize that if it had been his own daughter who'd been raped, he'd have done the same as Carl Lee Hailey did - he'd have killed those guys. That was the code part of the character that I loved.