McConaughey, the youngest of three boys, was born in Uvalde,
Texas, the son of Mary Kathleen "Kay" (née McCabe), a substitute school teacher, and James Donald McConaughey, a gas station owner who ran an oil pipe supply business and once played football for the Green Bay Packers. McConaughey has Irish ancestry and had what he describes as a conservative Christian upbringing. McConaughey's mother and late father divorced and re-married each other several times, in what McConaughey describes as a "loving, but unstable relationship".