In the summer of 1992, when Jason Cohen was a relatively unknown journalist and Matthew McConaughey was an extremely unknown actor, the two met on the Austin set of Dazed and Confused. “He looked so weird,” recalls 28-year-old Cohen, who was writing about the movie for Details. “He had this mustache and this funny hair. I didn’t know anything about him.” Three years later, there isn’t much that Cohen doesn’t know about McConaughey, and it’s all in this month’s cover story (see “His Time to Kill,”), about Hollywood’s latest “it” boy. Cohen, a frequent contributor to Texas Monthly and the co-author of Generation Ecch! (Fireside), isn’t surprised by McConaughey’s sudden transformation. “He’s got this aura,” he says. But unlike musician Courtney Love, whom Cohen profiled for a Rolling Stone cover story last summer, McConaughey doesn’t act like a celebrity—not yet, anyway. “When you interview a famous person and he has you to his house,” Cohen says, “it’s usually calculated: He figures the writer is going to write about going to his house. That’s not really the case with Matthew. He may continue to be that open, but he may not, now that the paparazzi are trying to find out where he lives.”
