Matthew McConaughey has revealed that he was offered the role of Joel in HBO’s The Last of Us and turned it down, saying the part “wasn’t for me at the time.” The Oscar winner shared the story on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast while promoting his new film The Rivals of Amziah King.
McConaughey, who was inducted into the HBO Hall of Fame for his Emmy-nominated turn on the first season of True Detective, explained that his decision was tied to a broader career pause rather than any problem with the material.
“I wasn’t really acting at that point,” he said. “That was when I was doing more writing and looking at leadership roles in life.”
Showrunner Craig Mazin, who co-created the series with original game writer Neil Druckmann, confirmed that the two had discussed the role but downplayed how far those talks went.
“I can’t say that it was serious,” Mazin said on the same podcast. “It was more of just like, ‘Hey, here’s something we can talk about.’”
Mazin added that McConaughey’s involvement would have produced a fundamentally different show.
“It’s one of those things where I’m sure there’s an alternate universe where it’s a different guy,” he said. “Matthew McConaughey is an amazing actor, I’m sure it would’ve been great, but it would’ve been different, and I like the one that we made.”
The brief exchange underscores a different moment for prestige television than the one that produced McConaughey’s Emmy-nominated True Detective run.
He framed the 2014 anthology, in which he starred opposite Woody Harrelson, as a kind of breakthrough for film actors willing to commit to a long-form series.
“We pulled off a real coup with ‘True Detective’ at a time when series were not something that actors like myself or Woody Harrelson would hop over and go do,” he said. “That one succeeded in a real royal fashion.”
By the time The Last of Us came around, that calculus had changed for McConaughey.
He was no longer looking to act at all, let alone sign on for a multi-season commitment.
Pedro Pascal ultimately landed the role of Joel, a Texas smuggler tasked with escorting a teenage girl (Bella Ramsey) across a post-apocalyptic United States.
The performance earned Pascal an Emmy nomination for lead actor in a drama, and the series itself was nominated for outstanding drama series.
McConaughey, for his part, has no regrets about the path he chose.
“I don’t know what would have been for me at the time,” he said, noting that the first script to lure him back to acting was The Rivals of Amziah King, his first live-action role since 2019’s The Gentlemen.
He also weighed the practical reality of a long series commitment, asking rhetorically, “Do I want that to be the case in success?”
McConaughey and Harrelson did share a screen reunion this year, though on Apple TV’s series Brothers, where the pair played fictionalized versions of themselves who discover they may be related.
D. Roberts covers movies and TV for The Pop Reporter — big studio releases, streaming shows, renewals, and casting news. He writes the news and the reviews, and he explains what a story means, not just what happened: which studio is taking a risk, what it says about a franchise, who it affects. His reviews give a clear opinion and back it up with what's actually on screen.
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Aug 14, 2026
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3 min read
