Matthew McConaughey has been acting since the early 1990’s but acting was not always on his radar. McConaughey went to the University of Texas at Austin with plans to become a lawyer but ended up changing gears to acting. After he landed his first major movie, “Dazed and Confused,” in 1993, McConaughey has gone on to become one of Hollywood’s biggest names.
McConaughey was born in Uvalde, Texas to parents Mary Kathleen and James Donald McConaughey, but grow up in Longview, Texas. He went to the University of Texas at Austin and had plans to be a lawyer but ended up taking a different route.
McConaughey began acting in 1991 in student films and commercials. McConaughey’s first big film role was as David Wooderson in “Dazed and Confused.” During this movie, McConaughey said one of his most memorable lines of his career “alright, alright, alright.”
Since “Dazed and Confused,” McConaughey has been in an abundance of movies. In 1995, he was in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation,” followed by “Lone Star” and “A Time to Kill.” In the early 2000’s, he began his rom com run, and was in “The Wedding Planner,” “Failure to Launch” and “Ghost of Girlfriends Past.” McConaughey worked with Kate Hudson on two of his romance movies, "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" and "Fool’s Gold."
After his rom-com run, he dipped back into different genres. He was in “The Lincoln Lawyer” and “Killer Joe” in 2011, “Magic Mike” and “Mud” in 2012, “Dallas Buyers Club” in 2013 and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” also in 2013. He was also in the television show, “True Detective” in 2014.
Some other films McConaughey has been in are “Interstellar,” “Sing,” “Gold,” “The Dark Tower,” “White Boy Rick,” “Serenity,” “The Beach Bum,” “The Gentlemen” and "Sing 2."
McConaughey is married to model Camila Alves, who he met at a club in Los Angeles in 2006. The pair had two children, Levi and Vida before they got married in 2012. They had their third child Livingston the same year.
Although McConaughey moved from Texas to California for a part of his life, he and his family made their way back to Texas, where they live now. Even though McConaughey still acts in movies, he has also worked on other things, including a memoir he released in 2020 called “Greenlights.”
