Shana Scott: She had her dog with her when she came in and read. I thought she was insane. I mean, amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing. I called Rick immediately and he goes, “That’s too bad. We’ve already cast the main senior girls out of L.A.”
Richard Linklater: Renée probably would’ve gotten a bigger part, but we had her as kind of a Darla, and Parker had that role.
Shana Scott: Rick goes, “Give her a role as a senior girl. That way I can kick her a line and maybe she can be part of the cast.”
Renée Zellweger: Somebody I worked with told me not to do it. It was like, “You’re not going to learn a lot. And after taxes and agency fees, you’re going to be pretty poor.” But I’m so glad that I did do it, because I learned how a set worked, and what different departments did. It was invaluable as a professional educational experience.
Richard Linklater: She had no resentment for not getting a bigger part. Another person could go, “Hey, fuck those guys,” but Renée wasn’t like that. She was like, I’m gonna get some experience. She played the long game.
Adam Goldberg: There were three meetings: the Don Phillips meeting, the Rick meeting-slash-audition, and the pizza party.
Don Phillips: We were under some time constraints when we had to go back to L.A. So I said, “Why don’t we meet on a Saturday, at Universal, and we’ll give pizzas, ’cause it’s Saturday?”
Joey Lauren Adams: The pizza party was so awful. I hated it. They were trying to make it like, “This is fun! It’s a pizza party! And we’re all hanging out!” But it’s all your competition. It just felt fake. And you had to watch people get called back in while you just sat there. I don’t think any of us had ever been through anything like that. Auditioning is hard enough.
Wiley Wiggins: That was a pizza party? I didn’t get any fucking pizza!
Richard Linklater: The pizza party was grueling. We wasted so much of people’s time. It was unorganized. And I felt really horrible about it.
Chrisse Harnos: Normally, you go into an audition, and it’s just you and the casting director—and eventually the director, if they think you’re right for the part. But this was like a round-robin. Like, you and I will do a scene together, and then you do a scene with this person. And you’re there all day.
Wiley Wiggins: They’d done such a good job of making the audition so casual in Austin, and when I got to L.A, it was suddenly like, oh, this is a serious thing. There’s gonna be money involved. I didn’t come from money. I think I got maybe $13,000 for Dazed, which isn’t a lot, but when you’re 15, that’s like, “Holy shit! I might be able to go to college for a little bit!” It suddenly got real. And scary. I started to clam up during the L.A. auditions, which worried Anne [Walker-McBay], because she was rooting for me.
Rory Cochrane: Everybody read for the Pink role, and for the women, it was Michelle’s role.
Jason London: They said, all the potentials for the cast, we’re gonna divvy them up for a scene between Pink and Jodi. It’s the one where I grab her breasts.
Michelle Burke Thomas: I did have to kiss Jason, yeah. I mean, I’m a total sucker for a good kiss, so it didn’t bother me at all.
Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: I didn’t go to L.A. for the pizza party. There was another girl reading my part there.
Jim Jacks: Who was that little girl? Her first part was in Dune, she played the little sister? Alicia Witt! Yeah. She was a finalist for the young girl, Sabrina. There was something slightly creepy but beautiful about her.
Jason London: We had a little 30-minute break, and we were on the Universal backlot, with tons of people around, and Rory Cochrane busts out a joint. I’m like, “Dude! What are you doing?” And he’s like, “I’m getting into character!” We ended up going back in and doing the rest of our auditions a little high.
Joey Lauren Adams: They started coming out and telling people they could leave. Like, “Thank you . . .” So it’s getting to be fewer and fewer people, and then you’re just hiding in the corner. Like, if they don’t see me, they can’t tell me to go home! It was finally like: Screw this! This is horrible. So I left. I went to 7-Eleven and bought an iced coffee. But something in me was like, “You have to go back.”
Wiley Wiggins: I got in trouble for walking off. I followed Milla Jovovich to a Subway, because she was hungry, and I got pretty scolded by Anne when I got back. She was like, “Wiley, I know Milla’s very beautiful, but you need to be here right now!”
Richard Linklater: Milla Jovovich had been in Return to the Blue Lagoon, so she was kind of a name. It was always like, “Get some names!” Well, there weren’t really any other names.
Ben Affleck: It was very stressful. It was a massive audition, and you thought, “I’m never going to get this part, this is a waste of time.” I read for the role of Pink, and right away they were like, “Why don’t you read for something else?” I was a little bit oversized and still had a lot of baby fat and the roles that I was playing were bullies. Throwing people against lockers was my specialty, if a 20-year-old kid can be said to have a specialty. So I read for the O’Bannion part.
Don Phillips: It was between Vince Vaughn, Cole Hauser, and Ben for that part. And Ben’s part was the asshole, right? Vince Vaughn, we didn’t think he was enough of an asshole. So we gave it to Ben.
Richard Linklater: At the end of the day, it really came down to, Who of these people do I want to be around all summer? And Ben, just as he was leaving, gave me this look, and I was like, Oh, he’s kind of a soft soul! I’ll work with him.
I liked Ben. He’s got that wicked humor. It reconceptualized the part. Like, Oh, play a bad guy who brings a certain joy to it.
Vince Vaughn gave a great audition! But I had Ben. I offered Vince Vaughn stuff later and it was just like, “Pass, pass, pass, pass.” It was like, “Does he hate me?”
Ben Affleck: The idea of doing the movie was certainly exciting, because I really liked Slacker. But I was vaguely disappointed that I was playing O’Bannion. Like, “Oh, it’s another bully role. This is all I’m ever going to play.”
Jason London: If you were still at the pizza party at the end of the day, you were in the cast.
Don Phillips: Jason London was an athlete. He was handsome. He was Pink! He was just right.
Jason London: I originally auditioned for the part of Tony. I don’t know at what point I became a Pink. I was such a little goody-goody in high school. But then I moved to L.A. and got into the devil’s lettuce. Me starting to smoke weed ended up being the best thing for that character, and for my career.
Deena Martin-DeLucia: I had to wait until the very end. Me and Joey Adams were up for Shavonne, and then it was so close between me and her, and we both got roles, so we were having a little bit of competitiveness.
Joey Lauren Adams: Don told me I didn’t have the tits to be Shavonne. There’s a demeaning of women that goes on that’s just normal. It’s like, the sky’s blue, and men are going to say shit like that. It happened so much, it’s like stubbing your toe.
Jason London.
Photography by Anthony Rapp.
You go into a room, and you can just feel the men looking at you, and you knew you didn’t get certain parts because your tits weren’t big enough, but they don’t say that. They say, “Yeah, she just wasn’t right for the role.” So in a weird way, I think there was probably some relief of Don just saying, “You just didn’t have the tits for Shavonne, Joey, but I love you! And I’m going to get you in this movie.” There’s an honesty to it.
Don Phillips: Bullshit! I never said that. Well, I might’ve said that after Dazed and Confused, when I was being Uncle Don, and everyone would come out to my house in Malibu. I gotta tell you, I was drunk most of the time back then, so I don’t remember. But I wouldn’t have said that during the audition. I was sober when I was working. And I’m the one who wanted her in Dazed and Confused!
Sasha Jenson: I was reading for Adam’s part all the way up to the very end. And it was like, “Oh, you got the part of
Donny!” And I was like, Who’s that?
But we all know a person who’s just that alcoholic disaster who will probably get in a fight at the end of the night when the sun’s already coming up, like, Oh my god, really? There goes Donny again! At the time, I had a roommate like that who was like the Energizer Bunny of disaster, so that’s kind of the guy I was aiming for.
Don Phillips: For the young girl, Rick liked Christin Hinojosa, who was from Austin. Claire Danes should have gotten that part, I still say. And it would have been great, because she would have gone on to become Claire Danes!
Richard Linklater: I think Don Phillips thought that people from Texas naturally couldn’t be as good as the kids we were meeting in New York and L.A. So I always felt it was my job to stick up for them. There’s talent everywhere, but not necessarily opportunity. So I had to fight harder for Christin, Wiley, and other locals. Christin was innocent enough, but there was a strength to her, too, and she had to stand up to Darla toward the end, so she was perfect for Sabrina.
Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: It’s funny, I have a sister named Sabrina. And did you see Rick’s daughter Lorelei in Boyhood? She reminds me of myself at the same age. I thought, “Did he cast me because he knew that, in the future, I’d look like his kid?”
Richard Linklater: A lot of these people I liked a lot, I had to make other people like them.
Rory Cochrane: That day, they kind of told everybody except for me that they had the part. The studio wanted another actor to play Slater. I believe it was David Arquette. And Rick wanted me. But I went back to New York thinking . . . I didn’t know what to think. I’d put it out of my mind, really. And then I got a call saying, you want to go to Texas for the summer?
Richard Linklater: Rory, the first audition, everyone was like, “Oh, there’s this guy who’s going to be a great Slater!” And every callback, he got worse and worse. I was having trouble selling him to everyone based solely on what he showed that first time.
Fortunately, he’d been in another film called Fathers & Sons, and he’d played kind of a druggie guy. Jon Kilik was the producer on that, and he told Jim Jacks he thought Rory was going to be a star. At the last minute, a recommendation from Jon Kilik came in. I was like, “Thanks! Whew!”
Anthony Rapp: Rick had to really fight for me. A lot of the movies I’ve done, like, Adventures in Babysitting, Chris Columbus had to convince the studio to cast me. School Ties, the original director did not cast me. His replacement cast me. I’m a little bit of an odd duck in some ways.
Even in Road Trip, I was cast in a smaller role because Crispin Glover was cast in my role originally, and he shot for one day, and they were like, “This isn’t going to work.” All these movies that I’ve done, there’s been some weird way that came to be.
Michelle Burke Thomas: Richard said the role of Jodi was modeled after his sister. At the time, my hair was really short, and I thought, I don’t really look ’70s right now. But I think they saw past that because I reminded Rick of his sister.
I wasn’t like, “Ooh, I’m gonna get this role!” It didn’t even cross my mind until the moment they said, “You’ve got the part.” And then I just fucking freaked out. I was screaming.
Joey Lauren Adams: I called my mom and told her I was gonna be in a movie. I don’t know if I truly believed it. I couldn’t even imagine what being in a movie would be like. It just seemed unfathomable.
Adam Goldberg: It was this cloud nine thing. I never really experienced that ever again. It was just like, “Oh wow, your life’s gonna fucking change.”
Chapter 7
I’ve Never Worn Underwear
“How could you not have looked at him and been like, This motherfucker is going to be a star!”
Richard Linklater and Matthew McConaughey.
Courtesy of Richard Linklater.
Before Dazed and Confused came along, Matthew McConaughey was just a popular kid from a middle-class family, born in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, and raised in Longview. His mother, Kay “K-Mac” McConaughey, was a kindergarten teacher and a former beauty queen. His father, Jim, was a former NFL draft pick of the Green Bay Packers. Jim ran an oil pipe supply business. The two older McConaughey brothers worked for their dad, and Matthew originally planned to become a lawyer. When he tells the story of how he got cast in his first movie, he makes it seem like a matter of randomness and good fortune. But pretending that he just got lucky is a good way to disguise his own cunning and resolve.
The more you learn about how McConaughey ended up in Dazed, and how he developed the character of Wooderson, the more it seems like his path was not only intentional, it was the result of savvy choices. He brought a nonthreatening charm to Wooderson, an ancillary character that could’ve easily skewed dark. He’s a sleazeball, but you can’t easily dismiss him as a predator. He’s the kind of guy who has located the tipping point between bad jokes and actual dangerous behavior and has decided to stay just on the right side of that line.
McConaughey’s approach to Wooderson helped transform the character from a tiny role into the movie’s single most memorable personality. The character would change the arc of McConaughey’s life as an actor. Now, it’s often hard to imagine anyone other than McConaughey playing Wooderson, but that connection wasn’t immediate. When he first auditioned, he seemed wrong for the role.
Matthew McConaughey: I didn’t want to come to UT [the University of Texas]. I wanted to go to SMU [Southern Methodist University] because I thought Dallas was a better city to get out of college and automatically have a job. But my older brother Pat calls me and goes, “Look, man, Dad’s not going to tell you, but the oil business is shit right now. We’re going broke. SMU is going to be like $18,000 a year, and Texas is going to be like $4,000 or $5,000. You’ll love Austin. You’ll walk in there in your bare feet, no shirt, and you can saddle up at the bar and there’ll be a cowboy to the right of you and an Indian to your left and a lesbian on the other side. Man, it’s your kind of place!”
So I come to UT. I’m taking liberal arts classes, headed toward law school. My family always said, “You need to be a lawyer, so you can come get us out of trouble.” But the end of my sophomore year, I’m a little restless of what my future career path’s going to be. I don’t really have the confidence to tell my family, hey, what I’d really like to do is tell stories, and film school might be a way to get into the storytelling business.
Well, right before my sophomore exams, I go over to my friend Braden’s house, and there’s a stack of Playboys sitting there. About seven Playboys deep, there’s a paperback: The Greatest Salesman in the World. And I said to myself as I grabbed it, “Who is that? Let the title speak now.” And I start reading.
I get to the first chapter and it says, “Okay if you’re going to take this journey, there’s 10 scrolls here. You got to read each one three times a day for 30 days before getting to the next one.” And I looked up, like, “Whoa! I gotta do this!” And my friend Braden, I’m shaking him awake, saying, “Hey, man, can I borrow this?” And without missing a beat, this cool cat goes, “No, you can’t. You can have it.” It was something that was passed to him that he was supposed to pass on.
So I go home and start that night: I read the first scroll, I read the second one the next afternoon. I read the third one that night. It was the first book ever that no teacher told me I had to read. It was like divine intervention. That book is all about finding your philosophy for what you want your life to be, and it gave me a lot of courage to mark my own path.
That night, I got the courage to call my mom and dad and tell them I wanted to go to film school instead of law school. I did not think that call was going to go well. I thought that call was going to be, “You want to do what?” Instead, after a good five-second pause, my dad goes, “That what you want to do?” I said, “Yes, sir.” He goes, “Okay. Well, don’t half-ass it.” I’ll never forget: don’t half-ass it.
And then I was having tears of joy. It felt like, “Ah, now
I can go mark my own path!” You know? That was a very big rite of passage. So I apply to film school. Well, I don’t have any film, but I had a badass GPA. And that’s why I got in.
Roderick Hart: I was the director of the honors program in the college. It was a selective program that let in 30 students a year. We usually had 120, 150 applicants. They had to have a minimum grade point average of something like a 3.5 to get in. Many had much higher. But we were trying to get the kids who could think out of the box.
Matthew was a very out-of-the-box thinker, very thoughtful, but also a little bit intellectually undisciplined, in the best sense of the word. He could come at things from a different point of view.
The most vivid example is, early in the semester, they had an exercise to capture something in a video format and make a case that this object should be put into a time capsule to send out signals of what our times were like in 1992. So Matthew’s video was of him.
Matthew McConaughey: They were gonna send the time capsule out in a spaceship. So I got up there and said, “The one item that’s going is me. I’m going to tell ’em on America.” And they said, “You have to have one item!” And I said, “What you didn’t see as I got on the spaceship is that I had this great paperback book called The Greatest Salesman in the World right between my butt cheeks. And I snuck it on. And this is going to be our bible.”
S.R. Bindler: Matthew’s reputation preceded him even when I was 15 years old. I was at a country club in East Texas with the best tennis player in East Texas, a guy named Kirk, and Kirk was buddies with Matthew. And I was sitting with Kirk after playing tennis, and Matthew walked by. Tan, good-looking, and so confident. And so Kirk says something like, “Hey, McConaughey, how’d it go Saturday night?” And they’re talking about girls, and Matthew’s like, “Oh, I kissed her here, I kissed here there . . .”
He was everything an introverted 15-year-old wants to be, and I was not. I had, like, dark hair, and dark eyes, and was Jewish in a very blond-haired, blue-eyed, Christian Baptist town. And so I was just like, “Ah, this guy, man!” But that was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
Alright, Alright, Alright Page 10