Apple TV’s new comedy ‘Brothers’ takes the phrase “based on a true story” and twists it into something considerably more complicated.
The series stars Matthew McConaughey (True Detective, Dallas Buyers Club) and Woody Harrelson (Cheers, True Detective) as fictionalised versions of themselves, longtime friends whose relationship gets considerably more complicated when they discover there may be an actual family connection between them.
After Woody’s daughter’s wedding falls apart, he packs up the family and heads to Matthew’s ranch in Austin for what is supposed to be an extended healing getaway. Things take a fairly dramatic turn when Matthew’s mother, Ma Mac, casually lets slip a decades-old secret suggesting the two men might actually be brothers.
That sends Woody searching for the truth while Matthew has another minor identity crisis to deal with, as he considers a potential run for Governor of Texas.
Of course, the whole thing plays off the very real friendship between McConaughey and Harrelson, along with the long-running story that the actors could genuinely be related. That means ‘Brothers’ spends a lot of time gleefully blurring the line between reality and complete nonsense.
We recently had the chance to chat with Holland Taylor (The Chair, Two and a Half Men), who plays Ma Mac, along with Natalie Martinez (Bad Monkey, The Fugitive) and Brittany Ishibashi (Runaways, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows), who play Matthew and Woody’s fictional wives.
Holland Taylor On Ma Mac, Secrets & Texas
Given that ‘Brothers’ is constantly playing with what might be true and what has been invented, you might assume Holland Taylor would have wanted to know how closely Ma Mac was based on Matthew’s actual mother.
Quite the opposite.
“I didn’t wanna know anything,” Taylor tells us. “I didn’t want to know anything because I, myself, was playing with the whole nature of it.”
For Taylor, that uncertainty was part of what made the character work. Rather than treating the series as a straightforward fictionalisation of real events, she approached it more like an elaborate story which may or may not contain a little truth.
“I think of it as a tall tale,” she explains. “Is it this, is it that? Well, I’m not gonna tell. I’m certainly not gonna tell you.”
That philosophy fits Ma Mac rather well too. She is the person who drops the enormous revelation which sends Woody hunting for answers, although whether that information was supposed to escape in the first place is another question.
Taylor suggests it may partly be down to Ma Mac having “a drink or two” and accidentally allowing something to slip. Not that she has much trouble recovering afterwards.
“She can get herself out of any corner,” Taylor says. “She slithers all around things.”
More importantly, Ma Mac appears to rather enjoy keeping the family guessing.
“She wants everybody off balance. She wants everybody needing to check in with her about everything.”
There is also another fun connection between Taylor and the series thanks to Matthew’s political ambitions.
In ‘Brothers’, Matthew considers running for Governor of Texas, while Taylor previously wrote and starred in ‘Ann’, her acclaimed one-woman play about former Texas Governor Ann Richards.
Taylor says, however, that she never really viewed ‘Ann’ as a play about politics.
“It’s really about the persona of a person who was a true public servant,” she explains.
Taylor had never been to Texas and knew very little about the state when Richards first caught her attention, but she became fascinated by her personality. Following Richards’ death, Taylor spent years researching, writing and developing the play through several productions.
“She was a firecracker of an entertaining personality,” Taylor says.
So while ‘Brothers’ brings her back into the orbit of Texas politics, this time around things are considerably sillier.
Natalie Martinez & Brittany Ishibashi On Becoming The Fictional Wives
If playing Matthew McConaughey’s fictional mother is slightly strange, playing the fictional wives of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson takes things to another level entirely.
Natalie Martinez plays Valentina McConaughey, while Brittany Ishibashi plays Joy Harrelson. And given that both actors are married in real life, we had to ask whether their actual partners had anything to say about suddenly finding fictional versions of the family appearing on television.
As it turns out, Camila Alves McConaughey and Laura Louie were around during filming and spent time with the cast.
The important distinction was that Valentina and Joy were never supposed to be direct recreations of Camila or Laura. Instead, Martinez and Ishibashi approached them as their own characters, while picking up some of the broader feel and dynamics surrounding Matthew and Woody’s family lives.
That still left one rather obvious problem: when you are making a series which deliberately borrows from reality, how do you know when something in the script actually happened?
Apparently, you often don’t.
The actresses say they were constantly wondering which moments were rooted in real events, with Matthew occasionally explaining where a story or idea had originally come from.
And some things did not really require much explanation.
Watching Matthew and Woody together both on and off camera made it fairly obvious how much of their onscreen relationship is drawn from the genuine friendship between them. The constant joking, winding each other up and keeping each other in check all seems to exist whether somebody is filming them or not.
There was, however, one crucial question still to settle.
After spending an entire season playing their fictional wives, which husband requires the most managing?
Woody.
That answer arrived rather quickly.
There is plenty of affection behind it though, with the pair describing both men as having a childlike quality and a genuine bond which brings out something special in each of them.
It may be called ‘Brothers’, and the series might spend much of its time wondering whether Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson really share some DNA, but their friendship already seems to have the sibling part pretty well covered.
‘Brothers’ is out now on Apple TV.
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