Mayor Kirk Watson of Austin, Texas, stood onstage at Barrel O’ Fun, a carnival-themed bar inside an Alamo Drafthouse in the city’s Mueller neighborhood, as he declared Aug. 10, 2026, “Matthew McConaughey Cinema Day.”
“Be it known, that whereas Matthew McConaughey is an accomplished actor and producer, and he’s also a beloved local Austin icon,” Watson read.
“All right, all right, all right…” he added, echoing the actor’s familiar refrain.
The mayoral pronouncement preceded a screening of “The Rivals of Amziah King,” McConaughey’s latest movie and his first major onscreen role in over five years. The film’s writer and director Andrew Patterson, and McConaughey’s co-star Angelina LookingGlass were there, along with the indie folk band the Last Bison, who performed, but the night belonged to McConaughey and his Texas-size legacy in the city that gave rise to the indie darlings Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez.
Bartenders served margaritas and negroni-style cocktails made with Pantalones, the tequila brand co-founded by McConaughey and his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey. Around 6:15, organizers unveiled a mysterious lump draped in fabric and a stack of cowboy hats to reveal a plaque commemorating the renaming of Alamo Drafthouse Mueller as the Matthew McConaughey Cinema. A picture of a younger McConaughey, circa “Dazed and Confused,” sporting his ’70s style side-sweep bob, was engraved in the plaque.
As the actor’s wife and three children lingered nearby, the crowd pulsated around him, tan and glistening in a navy blue pantsuit, his curls neatly slicked back. Their phones rose when he took the stage and spoke in his traveling preacher, free-associative kind of way, reminiscing about his unlikely foray into film: A man walks into an Austin bar and meets Don Phillips, the casting director of Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused.”
That man went on to become a Hollywood heartthrob before pivoting into more dramatic roles — starting with the director and fellow Austinite Jeff Nichols’s “Mud”— and launching his “McConaissance,” then landing an Oscar for best actor for his role as Ron Woodroof in “Dallas Buyers Club.”
Now, McConaughey has entered yet another phase of his career, one in which his persona has grown larger than the man himself — as the face of Lincoln vehicles, an author, a self-help guru, and finally, a man with a cinema named after him.
All the while he has stayed rooted in Texas. Born in Uvalde, where a larger-than-life facsimile cutout looms over the small town, he left for California in the ’90s to pursue acting. Years later, he returned, relocating his family from Malibu to Austin in 2014. A University of Texas at Austin alum turned “minister of culture,” he’s a fixture at Longhorns games, and teaches a class in the school’s film department. On various occasions, he’s flirted with the possibility of running for public office, though he’s largely kept his political views to himself. (He declined to answer questions about border wall construction in Big Bend, a region of West Texas beloved to him.)
“The Rivals of Amziah King,” which received a standing ovation during its screening at the South by Southwest Film Festival last year, is a blend of genres — part musical, part heist, part revenge fantasy. McConaughey plays the titular character, Amziah King, an apiarist with a preternatural knack for bringing people together, often in an eruption of song.
Though it was only Patterson’s second film, McConaughey said he was struck by its originality and keen sense of place. And the lead character, Amziah, McConaughey said, is “a legend of a man, almost mythological in his own mind and in the world that he lives in.”
When a grisly scalping accident involving a ponytail stuck in an industrial honey extractor reconnects Amziah with his former foster child Kateri — played by LookingGlass, her first feature role, and one she secured by responding to an Instagram casting call for an indigenous actress — Amziah passes along his knowledge of beekeeping onto her. Naturally, this involved interacting with bees. Often quite a lot of bees.
“They were vibrating,” said LookingGlass, though she said they didn’t concern her much because she’s not allergic.
“Matthew is allergic,” she added. “But he only got stung once.”
The Virginia indie folk band the Last Bison, which Patterson is a longtime fan of, inspired the movie’s score, which plays an outsize role in the story. The band is featured in several long jam sessions onscreen alongside McConaughey, who picks up his own instrument.
“I didn’t know how to play mandolin,” said McConaughey, who’s perhaps better known for playing the bongos. “That wasn’t easy. That’s just a hell of a lot easier when you ain’t got to sing. I find that when I sing well, I don’t play the mandolin as well. When I play the mandolin really well, I don’t sing as well.”
“We had a rehearsal last night,” said Ben Hardesty, the Last Bison’s frontman. “We had another rehearsal today.”
During the screening, audience members were each gifted a cardboard cutout of McConaughey’s face on a stick, which could be held up like a mask, or in a pinch, used as a fan against the oppressive Texas summer heat.
“Where does Matthew McConaughey end and where does Amziah King begin?” asked Anthony D’Alessandro, a reporter from Deadline, during a question-and-answer session that followed the film. The actor laughed in response.
Then, shortly after, McConaughey was onstage, mandolin in hand.
As the boot-pounding folk music played, the sort that would ordinarily seem to demand dancing, many in the audience stood still, instead training their phones on McConaughey, zooming as far as their cameras would allow, taking pictures of McConaughey, recording McConaughey, posting McConaughey.
Whether his singing was better than his mandolin-playing, it was hard to tell. Really, it didn’t matter at all.
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