14 The Times MagazineIt happened in the family kitchen one
Wednesday night in 1974 after Jim
McConaughey came home from selling
oil pipes and asked for extra potatoes. His
wife, Kay, sneered at him for being fat. Things
escalated from there.
Jim, a bear of a man who had played
American football for the Green Bay Packers,
flipped the table over. Kay ran to the wall-
mounted phone to call the police but instead
held the receiver in her hand, “like a club”,
recalls McConaughey, who was four at the
time and had fled to the next room to follow
the action from behind a sofa. When Jim
came within range, she let him have it (he
mimes the blow): “WHAAAAP! – across Dad’s
nose and blood gushing, hitting the floor.
“Pop just sort of pausing, stunned. Mom
in her nightie, Dad in his muscle shirt.” But
then she grabbed a 12in chef’s knife and called,
“C’mon, Fat Man. I’ll cut you from your nuts
to your gulliver!” Jim snatched up a half-full
bottle of ketchup, sploshed some of it in her
face and they began circling each other.
McConaughey, in a hooded top and shorts,
is pretending to be his mum now, wiping
stinging ketchup from her eyes with the
back of one hand, while slashing wildly at
her husband with the knife.
Then he becomes his father, seeming
to inflate in size up on the balls of his feet.
“Dad was a big man but he also took ballet. So
Dad’s kind of on his toes, he’s pirouetting, he’s
got one hand over his head. He’s dancing and
this thing is turning from graphic horror into
this mockery and he’s like, ‘Touché!’ ”
Swaying like a matador, McConaughey
drapes one hand over his own long, slicked-
back curls, stretches out the other to flick
more ketchup over his imagined assailant,
and circles a bit more.
“All of a sudden it ended. He’d worked her
to a stalemate. She dropped the knife. He set
the bottle down. Their shoulders dropped.
They looked at each other – blood all over
the floor. They’re sweating. F***! And then
they went to the floor and that’s when I left.”
McConaughey sits back down, brings his
hands together to represent his parents and
slowly interlaces his fingers.
“I didn’t stay around for the lovemaking,
but that’s what they started doing.”
It’s a lot to absorb over a Zoom call.Even though I’d already read an account of
the incident in McConaughey’s new memoir,
Greenlights, which he concludes by stating
simply, “This is how my parents communicated.”
Did that kind of thing happen often?
He beams. “I mean, I had no context, maybe
because I was four. My brother, Rooster, who’s
older, he’d probably be like, ‘Oh shit, yeah.
Seen that kind of stuff go down a lot.’ ”
Jim and Kay McConaughey divorced twice
but married each other three times. Their
home was occasionally violent but always
full of love. There was never a moment when
either of them would break off mid-explosion
and say, “Hang on a second. Matthew, go to
your room,” so there was no escape from the
daily soap opera. “And that,” he says, “was part
of the beauty of our family.”In the 27 years since his film debut Matthew
McConaughey, 50, has been many things
to the cinema-going public.
He was the “new Paul Newman” for a while,
before he gradually became a bit of a joke.
There was his 1999 attempt to resist arrest,
despite being stoned and stark naked, when
police found him playing his bongos too
loudly in his home at 2.30am. It blended
into the lust object years when McConaughey
seemed to be forever photographed running
shirtless along the beach in Malibu orstarring, often topless, in a string of mostly
forgettable romantic comedies.
But then there was the glorious comeback- “the McConaissance” – after McConaughey,
by now anchored by fatherhood, decided to
“f*** the bucks” and seek out more fulfilling
work. He instructed his agent not to take any
more offers for rom-coms and he sat, without
work, for a long, long time. “I didn’t know
how long it was going to go on. And it went
on a pretty damn good amount of time.
Long enough to become a new good idea.
Eventually, people started wondering, ‘Where
is Shirtless-on-the-Beach?’ Until two years
later when these roles started to come in and
then I just attacked them.”
What followed was an astonishing career
turnaround in which – among other career
highlights – McConaughey delivered a chest-
thumping, scene-stealing cameo in The Wolf
of Wall Street, headlined the mind-bending
science-fiction blockbuster Interstellar, was
a co-lead in the adored first season of True
Detective and, in 2014, won an Oscar for
Dallas Buyers Club.
Since then, he has been restlessly busy,
but apart from his voiceover work as an
entrepreneurial koala in the animated film
Sing, he hasn’t had another big film success.
Other things are more important though.
This year he’s been trying to raise morale in
atthew McConaughey’s blue eyes
gleam with happiness as he starts
to re-enact the time that his mother
tried to kill his father in front of him.
M
With mother Kay at the premiere of A Time to Kill in 1996 On the road with his AirstreamIn 2013’s Dallas Buyers Club, for which he won an OscarPREVIOUS SPREAD: JOHN RUSSO/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES, PA. THIS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES, SHUTTERSTOCK, MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY/INSTAGRAM