Long before Matthew McConaughey was going to award shows looking like an Andersonville Prison escapee and talking like Foghorn Leghorn, he was a recent UT Austin graduate who stumbled into his breakout role as aging creep Wooderson in Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused after running into casting director Don Phillips at a bar. That chance meeting resulted in an audition, footage of which the Criterion Collection has now put on YouTube. While video of McConaughey’s fateful audition has circulated in the past, Criterion’s version seems to be the highest quality version on the Internet—all the better to see how his interpretation of the part went from oddly beatific in the audition to mustached dirtbag in the movie.
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