Judy Greer, best known to audiences for playing the perpetually underappreciated best friend in films like The Wedding Planner, 13 Going on 30, 27 Dresses, and Arrested Development, just told a story about her early Hollywood days that is genuinely hard not to love.
Greer recalls McConaughey quietly stepping in with $20 at the Roosevelt Hotel
Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, Greer recalled arriving at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City for the table read of the 2001 rom-com with absolutely no idea what she was walking into financially. “I valeted my car; I didn’t know any better,” she said. “I didn’t have enough money to get my car out of the valet because I was so broke.”
What followed was the kind of small, unspectacular moment that somehow sticks for a lifetime.
Standing at a pay phone in the hotel lobby, trying to reach her friend Sean Gunn for help, McConaughey overheard the whole thing and quietly handed her $20. “I was so mortified,” Greer said, “but also: my hero.”
It is worth noting that at the time, McConaughey was already well on his way to becoming one of the biggest names in Hollywood rom-coms, while Greer was still very much figuring things out.
The Wedding Planner, which also starred Jennifer Lopez, went on to gross $94 million worldwide and did a lot of heavy lifting for McConaughey’s reputation as a leading man in the genre. Greer played Penny, Lopez’s colleague and best friend, and by her own account had a genuinely good time making it.
“I loved seeing him in hair and makeup every morning, because he had pajamas on and a Yerba mate,” she said. “I haven’t worked with him since, but I have a feeling not much has changed.“
The story is a small one by Hollywood standards, just $20 and a valet parking ticket, but it landed the way these things do when the person telling it clearly never forgot it.
Greer went on to book 13 Going on 30 and 27 Dresses off the back of The Wedding Planner’s success, while McConaughey continued his rom-com run before eventually walking away from the genre entirely, relocating to Texas, and staging one of the more talked-about career reinventions of the 2000s.
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