‘Half-brother’ celebrity debates show that biology matters

It’s become a bit of a running joke… but it isn’t actually funny. A highly personal and potentially traumatizing question is currently running through online tabloid pages and the minds of four celebrities regarding their biological fathers, calling into question the role of biological connections in our own individual identities.

Actors Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, as well as singer Billy Corgan and comedian Bill Burr, have publicly discussed the rumors that they might unknowingly be half-siblings. Though three of the men have said that they don’t want to dig for answers, the question that haunts them — are our parents who we think they are? — has become a game for the media and fans of celebrity gossip.

Around the world, however, thousands of people who were intentionally created in fertility labs are questioning their own identities — and it isn’t a game to them.

Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson

McConaughey, 55, and Harrelson, 63, have a close relationship, even acting as ‘uncle’ to each other’s children. But, when it comes to whether or not they are actually biological brothers, McConaughey would prefer to stay in the dark while Harrelson is pushing for a DNA test.

What Harrelson sees as something fun, McConaughey sees as potentially painful information. The results of that DNA test could cause McConaughey immense pain and a potential identity crisis.

According to Newsweek, it was during a 2023 episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” that the highly personal story was thrown into the public spotlight. Harrelson told the show’s host that there was a chance that he and McConaughey could be half-brothers, and McConaughey supported the story when he appeared on an episode of Kelly Ripa’s podcast later that year. McConaughey shared that his mother, Mary Kathlene McCabe, met Harrelson’s father in Texas while he was on furlough and she was mid-divorce from McConaughey’s father.

“And we, you know, where I start and where he ends and where he starts and I end has always been like a murky life,” said McConaughey. “And that’s part of our bromance, right? My kids call him Uncle Woody, his kids call me Uncle Matthew, et cetera, et cetera. And you see pictures of us, and my family thinks a lot of pictures of him are me. His family thinks a lot of pictures of me are him. And in Greece a few years ago, we’re sitting around talking about how close we are and our families and et cetera. My mom is there. And she says, Woody, I knew your dad.”

He continued, “Everyone was aware of the ellipsis that my mom left after ‘knew.’ It was a loaded K-N-E-W. Well, we went on to unpack this, what ‘knew’ meant, and did some math and found out that his dad was on furlough at the same time that my mom and dad were in their second divorce. Then there’s possible receipts in places out in West Texas where there might have been a gathering or a meeting or a new moment.”

Ripa asked if they had done DNA tests, to which McConaughey replied, “This is what we’re on the precipice of now. Look, it’s a little easier for Woody to say, ‘Come on, let’s do it.’ Because what’s the skin in it for him? It’s a little harder for me because he’s asking me to take the chance to go, ‘Wait a minute, you’re trying to tell me my dad may not be my dad of 53 years of believing that?’ I got a little more skin in the game.”

Yet even after McConaughey clearly stated that he did not want to know — at least not yet — if he and Harrelson are half-brothers, Ripa ignored his feelings and offered to do the swabs for a DNA test.

But as McConaughey said, he has something to lose: his identity and who he knows himself to be in relation to his family and the world. To learn definitively that the man he knew as a father was not his biological father after all would mean half of his family is not his biological family, and that there is an entire side of his biological family that he has never known. His heritage and ancestry would be completely upended. The connections he felt to his father would shift in his mind, and so many more questions — painful and emotional questions — could emerge as a result of that DNA test.

There is always the possibility that McConaughey and Harrelson are simply using the story to promote their AppleTV+ show “Brother From Another Mother,” in which they play loosely fictionalized versions of themselves. But that doesn’t change the fact that learning his father is not his father could have a detrimental effect on McConaughey.

Billy Corgan and Bill Burr

They don’t have a friendship like that of McConaughey and Harrelson, and didn’t even know each other before learning they might be brothers, but Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan and comedian Bill Burr have found themselves in the middle of a similar scenario.

Corgan, age 57, spoke in November about a conversation with his stepmother that took place 10 years ago, during which she told him that she thought Burr, age 56, “might be one of your father’s illegitimate children. Bill Burr might be one of the children that your father sired in his days of being a traveling musician.”

Recently, Burr was scheduled to appear on the “Howie Mandel Does Stuff” podcast, during which Mandel blindsided him when he brought Corgan on to discuss their potential biological connection. Sensing Burr was not happy with Mandel’s developing plotline for the episode, Corgan offered to leave, saying he thought Mandel had told Burr that he was going to come on the episode. Burr said Corgan could stay before referring to his father as a “piece of s**t with two kids this close together [and] he named them the same f***ing name.”

As Corgan tells it, he had been aware that his father, William Corgan, who died in 2021, had potentially 12 children out of wedlock. The elder Corgan was a musician and, according to Corgan, Burr strongly resembles him. When Corgan walked in to the studies, catching Burr off guard, Burr made his feelings known.

“Did you ever think the fact that I never told that story, that maybe you shouldn’t?” Burr asked Corgan. He added that Mandel was “rude” for setting up their meeting for “ratings.”

He said, “Listen, you’ve done well for yourself, I’m happy for you, but I just would prefer if you just kinda didn’t go around telling these f***ing stories. Like, why did you feel the need to do that?”

WARNING – Mild profanity:

Corgan explained that he had run into Mandel one day and “the first thing he said to me was, ‘Here comes Bill Burr.’ And I go, ‘Do you know the story somehow?’ And he said, ‘What story?’ And so I told him privately that story, and he said, ‘Oh you’ve got to say this on the air.’

Burr asked Mandel, “What was supposed to happen? Are we going to go play catch? We’re both in our 50s. At some point, we will hang out. I don’t think on a podcast.”

He added regarding Mandel, “He’s bringing it here, not because he’s trying to heal the bulls**t that we went through growing up. He’s getting [us] here just for the f**king ratings.”

He said of Corgan, “It’s not that I don’t like him; it reminds me of all that s**t.”

After Mandel left the room (he later apologized for the stunt), Burr and Corgan spoke candidly — to the point that listeners weren’t sure if it was a skit. Corgan maintains that it was all real.

He said, however, that after sitting on the potential news for a decade and finally speaking with Burr, Corgan does not think they are brothers. He thinks Burr simply looks like Corgan’s father — an unrelated doppelganger.

Burr said his father, Robert, was a dentist in Massachusetts, that he played different instruments than Corgan’s father, and he couldn’t sing. Corgan, however, was raised in Illinois.

“It’s taken on a life of its own,” said Corgan. “It’s sort of strange. It really started from honest things, which are: my father may have fathered 12 other children, and the facts of Bill’s life actually do match the story that I was told. There’s no invention there.”

After the podcast, Corgan said a friend urged him to get a DNA test. “A really good friend of mine said to me, looking around, ‘Okay, now tell me the truth.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think we’re related.’ And then my friend said, ‘Well, I think you are.’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess it’s possible because he really does look like my father in a way that’s almost shocking to me.’ So then my friend goes, ‘Well then, get a DNA test.’”

Burr, however, was clear that he didn’t want to go through a DNA test and didn’t want to talk about the private situation, especially not on a podcast, citing the “bulls**t” he and Corgan went through as children.

The press has run away with the story over the last few weeks, as Burr promotes his new Hulu comedy special, “Drop Dead Years,” and Corgan promotes his new podcast, “The Magnificent Others.”

What is a private and personal story has turned into a drama that viewers want to watch unfold.

Biology matters

Reality TV is likely responsible for at least some of the world’s hyperfocus on the personal lives of these men — but there’s another issue at hand.

Ripa, Mandel, and even Harrelson seem to miss the seriousness of the situations — pushing for DNA tests that McConaughey, Burr, and Corgan are clearly not ready to take — and may never be ready to take. In today’s world, where marriage and fertility are treated with mid- to low-level respect, it isn’t hard to understand why so many Americans are drawn to both the drama and the trauma Burr and Corgan appear to have experienced, and the devastation that McConaughey could face.

As the use of assisted reproductive technology increases, especially when it involves ‘donor’ sperm, donor eggs, and surrogacy, stories about discovering unknown relatives — many of them painful — are becoming more common — yet they are far less likely to play out on the world stage.

The U.S. does not maintain records on the usage of donor sperm (which should be a red flag to anyone considering it), but research does show that nearly 500,000 women have used donor insemination. In 1995, that number was 170,000, before dropping to 47,000 in 2008 and then rising substantially to nearly half a million in 2016.

While the practice is celebrated for helping adults who want to be parents, little thought is given to the children and how they might eventually feel about the means of their conception.

One woman, Laura Bridgens, learned as an adult that she was donor-conceived after asking her mother for an Ancestry DNA test kit for Christmas. Her mother was forced to come clean, and Bridgens said her life came crashing down. “Everything looks slightly different now [that] you know this,” she said. “It shakes things up. It really gets under your skin. It’s not something you get over. It’s very much a lifelong situation.”

Likewise, The Guardian reported on the story of Michèle, who took a DNA test mostly out of curiosity but also with the hope of accessing scholarships for individuals with Native American ancestry. But her test results looked much different than she expected.

“I just got very quiet. All these things from my past suddenly started going through my head: questions, feelings, things that couldn’t be explained, things that my mother would get angry or defensive about if I brought them up. I started to realise: ‘I think I’ve discovered a secret,’” said Michèle. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in two years but reached out for more information. Her mother denied that a different man might be her father, so Michèle called her aunt, who told her that the only other boy she remembered was the boy who took her to prom. The last name she gave Michèle matched the last name of one of the first cousins who had appeared in her DNA database.

“I stood up, my laptop went to the floor, I dropped my phone and I ran to the bathroom and started vomiting,” she said.

Her mother continued to deny that this man was Michèle’s father and told her “it wouldn’t matter anyway” because he had died in a motorcycle accident a year earlier. “That’s how I found that out. It was very cruel.”

There are similar life-altering stories occurring around the world. While the U.S. may not be keeping track, the UK is doing slightly better. According to the UK’s Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority, the number of babies born from sperm donation has tripled since 2006. It now accounts for one in 170 of all births and one in six births via IVF pregnancies.

Research has shown that children conceived via egg or sperm donors are more likely to struggle with identity and trust. The secrecy surrounding their genetic parents can have a lasting and profound impact on their well-being.

And, not unlike the celebrity ‘brothers,’ many of these individuals are discovering they have brothers — and sisters — they didn’t know about. One young man, Eli Baden-Laser, grew up knowing he and his sister were conceived using two different sperm donors because they were raised by two women. What he wasn’t expecting was that the first sibling he found was someone he already knew — a friend he had made growing up. Ultimately, he found 32 siblings. Their biological father had no interest in connecting with them, and Baden-Laser lives with “paranoia” that “we might be walking by siblings all the time without knowing it.”

Once you open up that door, it’s hard to close it. Some sperm donors have hundreds to thousands of children. Each is just a DNA test away from finding parents and siblings they may not even be looking for.

Assistive reproductive technology, most especially involving egg and sperm ‘donation,’ intentionally creates human beings who are denied their biological identity and access to at least one of their biological parents along with that parent’s entire extended family. It intentionally separates a child from his biological mother or father, creates trauma and trust issues, and fuels heart wrenching situations.