Matthew McConaughey recalls mom’s reaction to infamous bongos incident and arrest

Matthew McConaughey’s mother supported him even when he got arrested for playing bongos in his birthday suit.

Matthew opened up to director Richard Linklater at the Texas Book Festival about the infamous drunk.

Recalling his mother’s attitude after the incident, the Failure to Launch actor said: “‘You go outside in front of that media and you hold your head high. 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 continued.

As Matthew recounted in his 2020 memoir Greenlights, the arrest took place after he went to a football game and decided to spend the rest of the weekend partying. He smoked marijuana and listened to the “beautiful melodic beats of Henri Dikongué.”

He then went to the window and opened it to enjoy the view of the jasmine in his garden, and proceeded to play bongos along the beats of Henri.

“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,” he shared.