http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_pJ8oiFeGs
After Gill’s posting today about the release of a long-lost short film featuring a young Kevin Costner and my recent posting of the trailer for a 1970s porn film featuring a young Sylvester Stallone, I’ve decided to make it a weekly tradition here to make a posting entitled “Before They Were Stars” and showcase at least one piece of obscure footage from early on in a celebrity career. Since I’ve recently made a few postings related to them, I figured I’d start with Unsolved Mysteries and how they gave a young Matthew McConaughey his first acting job ever. For most of their re-enactments, Unsolved Mysteries would generally just hire local, non-professional actors from the location they were shooting at (hence why some of the acting was less-than-stellar). In 1992, they went down to Texas to shoot a segment and wound up hiring a local actor named Matthew McConaughey to play the role of a murder victim. Shortly afterwards, he would be cast in Dazed & Confused and jumpstart his career, and this marks the only time an actor from Unsolved Mysteries went on to become a huge star. This is actually a pretty disturbing segment and quite unlike the fluffy romantic comedies that Mr. McConaughey appears in these days. Maybe Unsolved Mysteries should have done a segment on what the makers of this Matthew McConaughey movie were thinking!