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It’s 1991, and McConaughey, now at the University of Texas, is making money on the side as a model and commercials actor. One morning in class his beeper goes off. There’s an audition in Dallas. This happens often, but he’s worked out a deal with his professors where he gets a gentleman’s C just for showing up occasionally. On his way home he uses side streets because he doesn’t like that stretch of interstate. Squirrelling his way through Waco, he smells meat. He comes across a house with a sign at the front and a barbecue pit at the back. There, a 6ft 4in muscle-bound man, the kind you don’t want to mess with, is handling briskets as big as his torso. McConaughey asks him for a sandwich. The man says he’ll slap some slices on white bread if the kid’s willing to pay. Then McConaughey gets his life story. He’s just out of prison and is from a family with generations of involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. This doesn’t bother him. Travelling with Big Jim, he’s met all kinds of characters.

The next time he goes to Dallas, and the time after, he stops at the brisket place. He brings a tape recorder and later transcribes the tapes, filling notebooks with the man’s life story. He won’t take his first formal acting class for another decade. So he prepares by studying people. “You don’t play characters who are celebrities,” he once said. “You play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.” It’s part of something he calls “localising”.

Around this time, McConaughey meets Don Phillips, a casting director, in a bar. They get drunk and are thrown out. Soon after, McConaughey steals the show as Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, playing the man with the wispy moustache who hangs around the high school after he graduates, to dispense wisdom and score chicks. “That’s what I love about these high-school girls,” Wooderson cackles. “I get older. They stay the same age.” But his father never sees the film that launches his son’s career. In 1992, five days into filming, Big Jim dies, aged 64. Poetically enough, it happens while he’s having sex with McConaughey’s mother.

One morning in August 1993, just before the film’s release, McConaughey pulls into Don Phillips’s driveway. He has arrived in Hollywood, and he’s about to localise like he’s never localised before.

It’s 1996. “Boom!” McConaughey says. “I get famous.” Suddenly he’s being touted as the next Paul Newman and getting prestige roles in A Time to Kill and Amistad, films that seem like a big deal at the time. Never mind that dour stares, awkward accents and period costumes don’t suit McConaughey. He is big now. He’s flooded with scripts and offers. “It was a lot incoming,” he says. “Life had pressed turbo pretty quickly.”

But boom is almost always followed by bust. The Newton Boys and EDtv flop hard.

He’s not the next Paul Newman. Disappointment sets in; he has a little fame hangover. In 1999, Austin cops catch him playing the bongos butt-naked, with a bong on the table and smoke in the air. That night, he says, “was real enjoyable until I looked up and saw someone I knew I hadn’t invited. It sucked when I was goin’ into the jail, but once I got in it became enjoyable again because there were some real fun cellmates. We were singin’ songs.” Even in jail, McConaughey localises.

In 2001, while in Ireland making Reign of Fire, a highly entertaining but definitely B-grade dragon apocalypse picture, he’s listening to a CD by the musician Ali “Farka” Touré. One song in particular moves him to tears. “Who is this guy?” he wonders. He finds out that Touré lives in a small village in Mali. A few weeks later he takes off with his backpack for Africa. He heads up the Niger River to Niafunké, where he finds Touré. They have dinner together, then listen to some of Touré’s songs, including McConaughey’s favourite, Ai Du. He’d thought it was a love song, but Touré explains the lyrics actually go “trust in your fellow man. If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot trust others”. McConaughey doesn’t often hear this sentiment in Hollywood. “It was a love song to the community,” he says.

Inspired, McConaughey hauls into the middle of the Sahara desert. He attends a music festival north of Timbuktu, then spends weeks living among the Bozo people in beehive-shaped huts along the banks of the Niger. They feed him and take care of him as if he’s one of their own. “I’ve always yearned for that,” he says. “But you know how we are over here. There are too many people with false ambitions, looking for an opportunity that may not be the best for you.”

It’s 2004, and the actor buys his Airstream. He’s been travelling around in a GMC Savana van he calls Cosmo, sleeping in the back. He can afford an upgrade. Wally Byam, the creator of the Airstream, has long been one of McConaughey’s heroes. “He went all over the world, places that no one else was going, from Cairo to Johannesburg, and he did it all in an Airstream.”

It’s no coincidence that McConaughey’s Airstream period runs simultaneously with his coming into his own professionally. He’s eased into starring in romcoms that critics hate but women love — films such as The Wedding Planner and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. He’s got a killer smile, a great tan, a knowing wink and an easy way with people. Plus, he looks good with his shirt off.

“Romantic comedies aren’t the first movies I hop out to see,” McConaughey says, whose latest film in that genre is Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. “But those are the ones that do really well with the public. They’re supposed to be like an easy Saturday afternoon. Keep it afloat, keep it buoyant. Bring some balls to it, but don’t go too deep to sink the thing. Wages are good, and they’re enjoyable to do, man.” Best of all, they fund a vagabond lifestyle.

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