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 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 follow-up to Slacker. “I went there because the bartender there gave me free drinks because he was in my film-school class,” McConaughey later remembered.
McConaughey and Phillips hit it off, of course (“We got kicked out! We were really drunk,” McConaughey said to Newsweek), which got McConaughey an audition. This week, Criterion uploaded video of the audition to YouTube for the first time.
McConaughey isn’t quite as polished as he is in the final film, but his golden, king-of-the-town swagger is already there, and we can see him deliver a couple of his classic lines. That’s the thing I love about Wooderson. We keep getting older, and he stays the same age.
Previously
This Is Where Matthew McConaughey Got “All Right, All Right, All Right”
