THE BAD BOY OF HOLLYWOOD
MATTHEW McConaughey’s blue eyes gleam with happiness as he starts to re-enact the time his mother tried to kill his father in front of him.
It 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 Matthew, 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 30cm 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.
Matthew, in a hooded top and shorts, is pretending to be his mom now, wiping stinging ketchup from her eyes with the back of