Are Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson Really Brothers? Yes and No.

Apple TV6 min readWoody Harrelson is already living up to the legend laid out by his “little brother” Matthew McConaughey. They’re sitting together and talking about the spoof versions of their real selves on the Apple TV comedy show Brothers, which speculates that the two Hollywood actors might actually be long-lost siblings.McConaughey is explaining what’s exaggerated in the series for laughs, while Harrelson immediately undercuts him by throwing a monkey wrench into his logic. “In this show, I'd be what …? Captain Order and you'd be Captain Chaos,” McConaughey says. “I'd be ambitious and ‘Here’s where I’m heading,’ and you’re like, ‘Heyyyy … what day is it?’”“Look, that's not too far from the truth,” Harrelson insists, cutting the air with his hand like a metronome. “He's militant about time and about getting shit done.”“For him,” McConaughey drawls, “time and context is irrelevant.”Harrelson flashes a guilty-as-charged smile. He may as well confess because the evidence was already piling up against him. Exhibit A: A publicist’s email from five minutes after the Zoom interview was scheduled to start: “I’m sorry, we have Matthew seated and just waiting on Woody to join him!”About twenty minutes roll by before the two gentlemen are finally together, but it’s all right. (All right, all right, all right, in McConaughey parlance.) They’re worth waiting for. “If he'd have been on time, this whole interview would be all fucked up,” McConaughey insists.For a moment, Harrelson looks genuinely stricken. “Was I late?” he says, shaking his head. “I do apologize. I thought I was on time. I was shaving.” But later McConaughey calls bullshit on that too, tracing a bristly ridge on Harrelson’s jawline.“He's always got a big patch on his face where he just missed it,” McConaughey says.“Goddamn it,” Harrelson says, brushing the area with his fingertips.“We got some up here too,” McConaughey says, pointing to his cheekbone. “We'll clean you up, though.”Apple TVLike Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Harrelson and McConaughey play heightened versions of themselves in Brothers.Consider this exchange Exhibit B in the case of fantasy versus reality. The sparring they do on Brothers, which debuts the first of its eight episodes on Wednesday, definitely manifests in real life as well. They poke, prod, and torment each other like two guys who share a deep bond, regardless of blood. Even if the lore is make-believe, it’s easy to buy the show’s conceit that McConaughey’s wildcard mother once “knew” (in the biblical sense) Harrelson’s scofflaw father, roughly about nine months before Matthew was born.The two men are separated by nearly a decade. Harrelson is sixty-five, and McConaughey is fifty-six, and they were both Texas-born but didn’t grow up together. Harrelson and his two actual brothers were raised by his mother in Ohio, and McConaughey was born in south Texas before moving to the eastern part of the state. The two first met in the late nineties and worked together on the 1999 Ron Howard-directed reality-TV comedy EdTV.They’ve been friends ever since, vacationing together with their families and forming a kind of found-brotherhood. At some point, they began to wonder if they might share some genetic connection. The Brothers show evolved from there.“Initially we were thinking it would be more like Curb Your Enthusiasm where there'd be an outline and then everybody would improvise, but then cooler heads prevailed,” Harrelson says.“We were also thinking, ‘Hey, let's just do it with the real families,” McConaughey adds. “My mom, and his family, and my family. Let's just throw us in and do …”A reality show? “Yeah, exactly,” McConaughey says. But here they part company again. “Well, not a reality show,” Harrelson corrects him. “We always wanted it to be fictional stories. I don't think that [reality] would've been the right move.”Instead, it’s a mix. Like Larry David on Curb, Harrelson and McConaughey play heightened versions of themselves. “Everything else is fiction,” Harrelson says. “But some of the shit, obviously, we kind of take our lives and we …”“Amplify it, exaggerate it, play into the stereotype, hit a parody touch here or there,” Harrelson interjects.“At first we were wanting to keep it pretty close to our lives and then we realized, ‘Well, that ain't going to work,’” Harrelson says.One of the biggest changes is that Harrelson’s real-life father isn’t exactly laughing material. Charles Harrelson was convicted of bank robbery in the 1960s and later became a contract killer, convicted in 1973 of a for-hire murder. He died in prison in 2007.Brothers gives Woody a less notorious and more benign father figure, but one who still has a long list of mug shots. “In this show, my dad's still alive,” Harrelson says. “We're not getting into specifics about Charles Harrelson. We call him Clive, and he's just generally a criminal.”“Up to mischief,” McConaughey adds. “Mischief got him into prison.”“Yeah, mischief,” Harrelson concurs. “A little mischief.”Watch the Opening Credits for BrothersTheir own mischievous sides come out as we turn to the old photos they supplied for the opening credits sequence on Brothers (streaming above), which shows that the two led eerily similar childhoods despite being separated by a decade and several thousand miles.As we scroll through the images, they really begin to batter each other—even though each image is accompanied by an equivalent photo of the other guy.“What you got over here, sailor?” McConaughey says as toddler Woody appears. “You've always been so preppy.”“Yeah, I didn’t realize,” Harrelson says.McConaughey is even rougher on himself as another little kid image scrolls by. “I must be sitting on the toilet dropping a deuce because I remember this wallpaper,” he says.“You’re moving more and more toward being shirtless, which is your natural state,” Harrelson points out.Then comes the teenage sports photos: McConaughey on the soccer field, and Harrelson in the gear for the seventh-grade football team. “I would always take the biggest guy on the other team, and I learned this little trick,” McConaughey says. “If you pull their shorts down a little bit when you're guarding them, they'll finally get pissed off and swing at you and get a red card and get kicked out.”Apple TVThe sparring McConaughey and Harrelson do on Brothers manifests in real life as well. They poke, prod, and torment each other like two guys who share a deep bond.“I mean, isn't that the perfect encapsulation of who Matthew is?” Harrelson says.When their high school headshots appear, McConaughey cites them as evidence that they’ve discovered the devil’s lettuce. “There we go. Looks like a little partaking has been going on,” he says.But even here, he gets pushback from Harrelson, a well-known cannabis advocate and owner of the West Hollywood dispensary The Woods. “That’s before I ever partook,” Harrelson insists.McConaughey concedes that his own dazed expression probably has a different explanation. “This was in Spain, and I had gotten in a fight a couple nights earlier. I got my nose broke,” he says. “Can you tell how wide my nose is right there?”The long, flowing hair of sixteen-year-old Harrelson then catches his attention. “You were living a decade behind us,” McConaughey says. “You were straight out of the ‘70s.”“That was, yeah, a lot of hair,” Harrelson acknowledges. “I didn't know at that time I was follically challenged.”When they both appear in suits and ties for what is clearly a senior class portrait, McConaughey erupts in laughter. “Look at Blue Steel here!” he says, invoking Ben Stiller’s famous modeling glare from Zoolander. “I'm giving you some teeth, right? But look at Blue Steel on the left with the part cut right down the middle.”Times have certainly changed. McConaughey says they are both now more aware of their appearances. “I didn't know at this time about camera angles. Lower the chin in, lock in. Keep the angle down, man,” he says.There are photos of them both with dogs, photos of them both in plays, and then come the snapshots where they are together, usually arms around each other, even when they are swimming in the ocean. By the end of the reel, where teenage photos of them fuse into one, they have their arms around each other again.“We’re starting to merge!” Harrelson declares.Nowadays, they share the same profession, but also some of the same indignities. Neither tends to whine about fame, but one thing from reality that does become a joke on the show is when people mistake them for someone else.“You get people that come up sometimes and go, ‘Hey … you’re great in Sweet Home Alabama!” McConaughey says. “ And I'm like, ‘Wasn't me.’”“I always just say, ‘Oh, thank you!’ No matter what it is,” Harrelson adds. “Or they go, ‘Hey, aren't you that guy from …”“Wedding Crashers?” McConaughey finishes. “No, it was Planner.”“I get malapropped for you and Owen [Wilson],” Harrelson says. “It's generally the fellow Texans. Actually, it happens way too much. It's concerning, a little bit.”Then there are the fans who miss the mark by a lot. “Another thing that happens a lot is: Hey! Woody Allen!” Harrelson says. McConaughey is staring at him, stunned.“You see the remembrance?” Harrelson asks him.