Woody Harrelson isn’t hedging. In a new interview on Hey Jonas! podcast, the actor said flat out that he believes he and Matthew McConaughey — best friends of 30 years — are actually half-brothers. His co-star does not agree.
McConaughey laid out the origin story. About nine years ago, the two families were on vacation together, as they’d been for decades. Harrelson’s kids call him “Uncle Matthew.” McConaughey’s kids call Harrelson “Uncle Woody.” Then McConaughey’s mother, Kay, weighed in.
“This particular night at about 1 a.m., my mom — after just the right amount of Kendall Jacksons and whatever she smoked when she took a walk with Woody that night — throws this line at us,” McConaughey said. “She goes, ‘Oh, I knew your father, Woody.'”
The pause in the middle did the damage. “The innuendo in that ellipsis made everybody, even my six-year-old son, think, oh, they must have hooked up,” McConaughey said. The adults laughed. The kids didn’t. And Harrelson never let it go.
Harrelson is unmoved by his friend’s skepticism.
“We know for sure that they shagged,” he said. “They definitely did the horizontal bebop, and it’s a real deal.”
His case rests on a timeline. McConaughey’s parents, Jim and Kay, married three times and divorced twice. “The timeline would add up that whenever I was going to be conceived, at my age, would have lined up with my mom’s second divorce,” McConaughey acknowledged.
The rumor is now a series — their first project together since True Detective roughly 12 years ago. The original pitch was a docu-comedy using their real families, but they scrapped it.
“We were really kind of bullish about keeping it as realistic to our relationship as possible,” McConaughey said. “But what we found out was, no, we need to fictionalize this a little bit. It wasn’t funny enough. The stakes weren’t high enough.”
