For the last 30 years, Matthew McConaughey has been defined by his easygoing and laid-back persona, and it’s not like it’s an act he puts on in public.

After all, people don’t get arrested for playing the bongos naked if they aren’t in tune with the more spiritual side of life. While the Academy Award winner has played his fair share of tightly wound characters, in his free time, he’s never going to lose his temper on a whim or get involved in violent confrontations.

If anything, he was taking it too easy for too long, with McConaughey happy to parade around in a state of semi-undress as the laconic face of the mid-budget romantic comedy. It did wonders for his bank balance, but returning to the same well so often leads to not only diminishing returns but professional malaise.

Thus, the McConnaisance was born, and his reinvention as a dramatic powerhouse breathed new life into a career that was in serious danger of stagnating. He inhabited plenty of complex, complicated, and troubled figures during that golden period, but an audition gone awry showcased a side of the star that’s about as far away from his status as a chilled-out everyman as possible.

Although he didn’t specifically name the movie or the time period, McConaughey shared with The Hollywood Reporter that his worst-ever audition “was a Lee Tamahori film” where he “went to read on that for the part of a heavy.” Using the power of deduction, 1996’s Mulholland Falls is the most likely candidate.

It was in development before Joel Schumacher’s legal drama A Time to Kill made McConaughey a star, and he was too well-known to play a miscellaneous thug by the time Tamahori got around to helming survival thriller The Edge, or the psychological crime story, Along Came a Spider, and it definitely wasn’t Die Another Day or xXx: State of the Union, either.

“I knew going out, ‘Man, you kind of gave 80%’. And I got in my truck and turned around – U-turn – came back in, just right past the secretary, knocked the casting director right out of the way, went right up to him and weight-nailed him against the wall,” he said of deciding that an impromptu burst of physicality was the smartest way to immediately atone for his bombed audition.

“I grabbed the next guy, and put in in the corner, and grabbed, like, a spoon or something,” he recalled. “I just wrecked the room and left. I didn’t hear back from ’em.” Improvisation can often work in favour of an auditioning actor, but considering McConaughey had already left and come back before surprising Tamahori and his cohorts with some unplanned and unexpected acts of threatening violence, it’s easy to see why nobody wanted to cast him after that.