Watch Matthew McConaughey’s “Dazed and Confused” Audition Tape
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ABC/Randy Holmes(NEW YORK) — When Matthew McConaughey was just a young film student at the University of Texas at Austin, he auditioned for the role that would launch him into fame — Wooderson in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.
Now, thanks to The Criterion Collection, you can see the audition online.
The video shows McConaughey, in his early 20s, dishing out lines with his familiar Texas drawl, those wavy blond locks and that smile.
Up to that point, McConaughey had only been in a beer commercial and a music video. But he’d had a fateful encounter at the Hyatt Hotel bar with the film’s casting director, Don Phillips.
The pair got to drinking and talking “about life and women and some great golf hole he’s played, and I guess we got a little rambunctious,” McConaughey recalled in 2003 for Texas Monthly.
Both were bounced from the bar, and Phillips invited McConaughey to audition the next day as the charming-but-creepy grad Wooderson, who still haunted the old high-school hangouts.
As the video shows, McConaughey nailed the part — and his future.
Accepting the Academy Award 20 years later for Dallas Buyers Club, McConaughey, now 45, paid homage to his first role, uttering Wooderson’s famous line, “All right, all right, all right.”
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