Matthew McConaughey’s incredible stories about his father and how he died: “He called his shot”

It’s the phone call that we all dread, but Matthew McConaughey wasn’t expecting any bad news when he first heard that his father had passed away.

Jim McConaughey died unexpectedly, aged 62 in Fort Bend, Texas on August 17 1992. At the time, Matthew was waiting for his first break in acting. He was on set filming his third feature film Richard Linklater‘s coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confused - his first big movie. He was just five days into shooting the film in Austin when his mother Kay called to break the sad news.

Matthew McConaughey‘s dad dies

“I got a call from my mom: ‘Your dad died.’ My knees buckled,”Matthew recalled in his memoir Greenlights. “I couldn’t believe it. He was my dad. Nobody or nothing could kill him. Except for mom...”

James McConaughey wouldn’t live to see his son hit the big time. He died after suffering a heart attack. But Matthew reveals more about his father’s last minutes in a shockingly open confession in his book.

He explained this his father passed during an intimate moment while in bed with his mother. ”He’d always told me and my brothers, ‘Boys, when I go, I’m gonna be makin’ love to your mother.’ And that’s what happened. He had a heart attack when he climaxed,” McConaughey confessed.

“6:30am on a Monday morning - he had a heart fibrillation,” the actor explained, adding a detail - his mother wanted her husband to be carried out naked, not covered up, so that the neighbors could marvel at his appendage. “The paramedics were covering him and all the neighbors were out in the street, and he’s going down the garage,” he wrote. “What’s the sensible thing to do at 7 a.m? Cover him. My mom’s out there half-naked, ripping the sheet off, going, ‘Get that sheet off him; you’re gonna see how big Jim went out!’”

In August 2021, he elaborated a little on his father when he was a guest on the Howard Stern Show. “The whole thing about my dad’s passing and the timing. He moved on five days into me working on Dazed and Confused. So, he didn’t come to see it, but he lived a life for me to do what turned out to be my career - which, I got some nice peace in that because everything before that was a hobby. He got to see me get a job, that became my career," he explained.

McConaughey on the origins of “Alright, alright, alright”

Another, more salubrious anecdote from his chat with Stern was how he came up with his famous “Alright, alright, alright” catchphrase for the movie. It was “borrowed” from The Doors frontman Jim Morrison, and comes from a live recording that McConaughey listened to relentlessly.

“Number one, Linklater on that film, hi first piece of direction was he handed every character a cassette with a mix tape of music. He goes, ‘This is what I think you gotta be listening to’. Well as a young actor, you’re getting handed bad ass music on a cassette to go and rock out to? Okay. So that song in particular, I did not remember. I think it’s a live album in Copenhagen or something. Morrison’s like, ‘Alright, alright, alright’ he barks it out, like, four times,“ the actor told Stern.

“I’m not thinking of that, but on the night, where I go to do a scene, now I’m getting nervous, first scene I’ve ever done, it’s not scripted... So I’m telling myself in my head, ‘Who’s my man?’ I go, well I’m about my car, I’m about getting high, I’m about rock ‘n’ roll - and I hear, ‘Action!’ I look up and in my head, I go, ‘The fourth thing I’m about, is chicks’ and that’s what I’m about to go and pick up. In my mind, I said, ‘What you got? Three out of four? ‘All right, all right, all right!‘”

Just for the music nerds, McConaughey improvised line actually comes from a live recording of Roadhouse Blues, spliced together from soundboard records from New York City’s Felt Forum and Detroit’s Cobo Hall.

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