Matthew McConaughey says his mother wasn’t surprised when he got was arrested for playing the bongos while naked and high.
Speaking to director Richard Linklater at the Texas Book Festival, the Interstellar actor recalled the advice his mother gave him following the infamous 1999 incident.
“‘You go outside in front of that media and you hold your head high,'” McConaughey recalled his mother saying (via People). “‘I know what you were doing last night playing bongos, smoking that funny stuff in your birthday suit, and you’ve done it many times before and I know you’re going to do it again.”
“‘Don’t walk into a place like you want to buy it, walk in it like you own it.’ She tells me that before we go to prom, she tells me that on the morning before I went in to go do a screen test for A Time to Kill,” McConaughey said.
According to McConaughey’s 2020 memoir Greenlights, the bongo incident occurred after he went to a Texas Longhorns football game and spent the rest of the weekend partying. In the early hours of Monday, October 25, the actor decided to “wind down” with some marijuana and the “beautiful melodic beats of Henri Dikongué.”
He opened his window to smell the jasmine in his garden, and then decided to play along with the music with his bongos, he revealed.
“What I didn’t know was that while I was banging away in my bliss, two Austin policemen also thought it was time to barge into my house unannounced, wrestle me to the ground with nightsticks, handcuff me and pin me to the floor,” McConaughey wrote in his memoir.
When an officer told him he was also being charged with resisting arrest, he yelled: “You broke in my house! Fuck yeah, I resisted.”
Linklater then noted that McConaughey’s mother holds another distinction. “You’re not the first McConaughey to write a memoir,” he said. “Your mum beat you to it.”
In other news, McConaughey recently channeled his inner-David Attenborough for a series of trailers promoting the new dystopian horror game Exodus.