Before there was Wooderson, there was Walkaway Joe!
Matthew McConaughey may have gotten his big break playing David Wooderson in 1993’s “Dazed and Confused,” but that wasn’t his first time on camera.
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The year before, he starred in Trisha Yearwood's country music video for her single “Walkaway Joe,” and he reminisced about that very early role in a recent interview on “The Kelly Clarkson Show.”
“Well, 'Walkaway Joe,' I think it was early 1992, I’m going to college here at the University of Texas — this was before 'Dazed and Confused' — and I was trying to get odd jobs in front of the camera when I could and I got cast in that music video to play Joe,” he told Clarkson in a virtual interview from Austin, Texas.
McConaughey was in his early 20s in the music video, which also featured vocals from Don Henley. The “Dallas Buyers Club” star played a ne’er-do-well heartthrob who seduces a teenage girl and draws her into a life of crime.
There are plenty of moody black-and-white scenes of McConaughey and his love interest gazing at each other in cornfields, driving down dusty country roads, and at one point skinny dipping, before he eventually abandons her at a motel.
“Things are going well, then where we end up at the last stop, she wakes up and Joe, myself, is nowhere to be seen,” McConaughey recalled to Clarkson.
Despite appearing in the music video, he never shared any scenes with Yearwood, and he revealed he has still never met the country singer in person.
Yearwood also looked back on McConaughey’s very early performance in her video in a 2014 interview with People.
“He was cast from local talent in Austin, Texas, where the footage was shot,” she said. “The performance with Don Henley was shot in Nashville, so I never met Matthew.”
She also joked that “if he ever wants to be in another Trisha Yearwood video, I won’t make him audition.”