Watch Matthew McConaughey’s Lost Audition Tape For ‘Dazed and Confused’
To commemorate the Criterion release of the Richard Linklater classic, check out lost footage of McConaughey’s Dazed and Confused audition.
via YouTube
"All right, all right, all right."
With those six immortal words, Matthew McConaughey was forever enshrined in film history. The affable Texan’s casting as Wooderson, the high school grad-lingerer with a penchant for redheads in Richard Linklater’s cult classic Dazed and Confused is by now the stuff of legend.
McConaughey told me he was hanging out at a hotel bar in Austin, Texas, when he ran into Don Phillips, a casting director. The two got to drinking and then all hell broke loose.
“Top of the Hyatt, Thursday night!” McConaughey said with a laugh. “I went there because the bartender there gave me free drinks because he was in my film school class [at the University of Texas at Austin]. We got kicked out! We were really drunk. We were talking about a golf hole that we had both played and we were just so loud that management told us to leave.”
Their fateful fracas landed McConaughey a meeting with Linklater and, well, the rest is history. Over twenty years later, Linklater is the frontrunner for the Best Director Oscar for his 12-year opus Boyhood, and McConaughey took home the Best Actor Oscar for his riveting turn as AIDS crusader Ron Woodroof in last year’s Dallas Buyers Club.
The Criterion Collection recently released a video of McConaughey’s audition for Dazed and Confused online to commemorate the movie’s Criterion release, and it is a doozy.Check it out here:
You can check out my interview with McConaughey for Newsweek here where he discusses the origin of “All right, all right, all right,” which was improvised on the very first day of shooting Dazed, as well as the inspiration for his now-signature slogan, “Just keep livin’,” in a separate interview with the actor for The Daily Beast, here.