Watch Matthew McConaughey‘s Dazed and Confused audition.
Matthew McConaughey is one of Hollywood’s biggest actors. After winning an Academy Award, audiences around the world wait to see what the actor is going to do next. But, did you know McConaughey was discovered at a bar?
Before he was an Oscar winner, before he had his “all right, all right, all right” catchphrase, and before he’d even scored his first movie role, Matthew McConaughey was just a twentysomething aspiring actor hanging around the Hyatt hotel bar in Austin, Texas.
That’s where he met casting director Don Phillips, who was working on Richard Linklater’s next movie. “I went there because the bartender there gave me free drinks because he was in my film-school class,” McConaughey later remembered.
Matthew McConaughey became good pals (“We got kicked out! We were really drunk,” McConaughey said to Newsweek), which got McConaughey an audition.
Newly resurfaced video of the audition has popped up on YouTube and it’s pretty interesting to see the young aspiring actor before he became famous.
Following Dazed and Confused, McConaughey drove to Hollywood to become an actor, and defying absolutely every actor story you’ve ever heard, booked two consecutive parts at his very first two auditions.
For his second, for Angels in the Outfield (starring a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the part was for a baseball player. So McConaughey bought an old baseball hat at a 7/11, and walked in the room with the sun streaming in behind him, looking like a bronze Texas God-king. The director asked, “Have you played any ball?” “For 12 years,” McConaughey told him. “You’re hired,” said the director. [via]
