Matthew McConaughey Turned Down ‘The Last of Us’ for a Funny Reason

I had a really good time with the first season of The Last of Us, and it brings me no pleasure to report that the show came out three years ago. Absolute insanity. I knew that there was a lot of time between seasons (the second came out two years later), but it never occurred to my dumb brain that that meant it’s been so frigging long since the first season. And it looks like we’ll have to wait a while for the third season as well, as it won’t hit until sometime in 2027.

That’s a long-ass time to be making a TV show, even by today’s standards. Plenty of shows, especially prestige ones, spend lots of time in production, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. You want people to be able to take their time and make the best show possible, but the former does not always guarantee the latter. Additionally, working on anything for that long can start to make it lose its luster in many ways, something Matthew McConaughey considered when turning down a role in the series.

The actor recently sat down for Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast and was asked about being approached for the show, something I was wholly unaware of, but it’s true. Showrunner Craig Mazin had conversations with McConaughey about playing Joel, and while the True Detective star thought it was good, he wasn’t as interested in acting at the time. Additionally, he wasn’t sure he’d want to be working on it for a long period of time, choosing instead to do a movie.

“It’s a movie, it’s one movie,” he said of his upcoming film The Rivals of Amziah King. “That… a series… you do have to consider, I do consider, ‘Well, you want this to succeed, well, in success, this is something you’ll be doing for years, and years, and years.’ Do I want to, you know, for that to be the case in success?” McCounaghey also explains that few things really grabbed him at the time, but the schedule for a TV show being the issue was particularly funny for this show, given, well, a pretty big SPOILER I will discuss below.

Ready? It’s been enough time at this point, but I’ll give you one more chance.

You good?

Okay.

Joel dead, y’all. The man is dead and gone, and it happened in the first episode of the second season. He’s still shown in a specific flashback, but if McConaughey had decided to take on the show, it likely would have been a slightly greater time commitment than True Detective, but nothing too crazy. Pedro Pascal, who took the role instead, isn’t exactly hard up for work. The man clearly has the time. But McConaughey either didn’t know about Joel’s demise or didn’t care.