Who Started the Rumor That Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson Are Related?
Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey’s aptly named Apple TV+ project, Brothers, has reignited interest in one of Hollywood’s long-standing rumors. For years, there has been chatter that McConaughey and Harrelson are actually half-brothers. While the pair have played into the bit, a DNA test is not on the way, so the rumor will remain just that. Still, you won’t believe who started it all in the first place.
How the rumor started
For years, rumors that Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson were secretly brothers became a staple of talk show interviews. Both actors have always been good sports about it and discuss the rumor that first gained legs from Matthew’s own mother. According to McConaughey, the whole thing traces back to a single conversation on a family vacation in Greece. He told Vanity Fair that nine years ago, during a family holiday in Greece, his mother told Harrelson she had known his father before McConaughey was born. It was an offhand remark, delivered mid-conversation, but it landed hard. Harrelson latched onto it immediately, while McConaughey brushed it off. As he put it, “Woody believed it from the get-go, and I don’t believe it from the get-go.”
McConaughey later revealed that the way his mother said “knew” left very little to the imagination. Looking back, the two actors discovered that it was entirely possible, since Harrelson’s father was on furlough around the time McConaughey would have been conceived. The actors, however, did not grow up knowing each other. They only developed a friendship in 1999 when they filmed EDtv together.
Who were their fathers?
At the center of the entire story is Woody Harrelson’s father. Harrelson’s father, Charles Voyde Harrelson, was a career criminal who died in prison in 2007. Charles was convicted in 1973 of murdering a grain dealer and served just five years before being paroled. His son was just 12 during that prison stint. In 1981, he was convicted again, this time for the 1979 assassination of federal judge John H. Wood Jr. It was a contract killing. He received two life sentences and died of a heart attack while serving them.
While Matthew McConaughey’s own mother created the ambiguity about his paternity, Matthew McConaughey’s father, Jim McConaughey, was involved in his life. Jim McConaughey was an oilman. He and Matthew’s mother, Kay, divorced twice and remarried three times, a dynamic McConaughey has described as passionate and occasionally violent. Jim and Kay McConaughey were in the process of their second divorce when Matthew was conceived. Jim McConaughey died in 1992 from a heart attack.
Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson won’t be taking a DNA test
Despite there being plenty of ways for Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson to either confirm the rumor for good or move on entirely, it won’t be happening. A simple DNA test could prove if the friends are actually long-lost half-brothers once and for all, but McConaughey is passing on that option, though Harrelson apparently has been open to it.
McConaughey has said that if he were to take the test and find out he was not fathered by Jim McConaughey, he’d have to reconsider who his actual biological father was. For Harrelson, there is no real risk. His parents remain his parents, and he gains a brother, should the test come back that they are connected. Matthew noted he has more “skin in the game,” and that taking the test would simply risk too much.
Still, the longtime friends do operate mostly as siblings. Their families are close, they serve as uncles to each other’s children, and they vacation together. A DNA test wouldn’t change any of that.
