Footage has reemerged of Matty Healy starring in Waterloo Road, before finding fame with The 1975. Check it out below.
Before he went on to secure his status as a Glastonbury headliner and win over legions of fans, Matty Healy had appeared several times as an uncredited extra in several episodes of the original run of the BBC show, which ran between 2006 and 2015.
The appearances were largely thanks to his parents, who both had roles on the drama – mother Denise Welch played the character Steph Haydock, and his father Tim Healy played a security guard called Dave Miller.
Over the weekend, the official Instagram page for Waterloo Road posted a compilation of clips from the earlier seasons of the show, all of which show the brief moments that Matty Healy made it on screen, playing one of the students.
Snippets include him walking with a crowd of students outside the school and turning his nose up at the idea of petting a falcon in a birds-of-prey display, getting scolded by a teacher as he is found laying on a sofa kissing the character called Michaela White (played by Zaraah Abrahams), and playing the acoustic guitar in a jam session with a handful of other students.
“Imagine… The 1975 playing at Waterloo Road? ,” the caption read. Check out the post below.
As well as taking on small roles in Waterloo Road before finding fame with The 1975, Healy also had various other music projects on the go – one of the most recognised being the emo-driven Drive Like I Do.
In 2017 Healy clarified that Drive Like I Do and The 1975 were “separate entities”, and then he spoke about revisiting the project back in 2020 when he told NME that he was working on getting old Drive Like I Do songs remastered, before teasing that a full album could be on the way.
Not much materialised after that, however, the singer and guitarist did talk to NME again in 2022 as part of the Big Read cover story – shortly after the release of The 1975’s fifth album, ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’ – to give an update.
He said that he credits Drive Like I Do as the group that helped him “figure out how to write songs”, and said that the record was still in the works.
“All of things I said I’m gonna do – films I’m writing, records that I’m making – they’re still in development; it’s just that The ‘75 takes priority in my mind. It’s not that it’s the thing that makes me money, it’s just way more important,” he said.
“I made the Drive Like I Do four track record, and I really liked it. I have to sit on stuff and edit it before I love it. By the time I’d on it and started editing it, I was making a ‘75 record, [Beabadoobee] had fallen in love with ‘Pictures Of Us’ which I thought was better for her,” he added. “There are two Drive Like I Do songs that I just want to put out, but then I’m like, ‘When am I going to finish the EP?’ It does exist and it is what you imagine. It’s like if Drive Like I Do had never left that emo world – what would it sound like now?”
More new music from The 1975 is on the way too, according to Healy.
The band have been largely inactive following their impressive headline set at Glastonbury 2025. While he didn’t reveal much about the follow-up to 2022’s ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’, he did suggest it could be a double album that might be called ‘DOGS’.
No official confirmations about new releases or tour dates have been shared yet, although the frontman has said that 2026 and 2027 “look mental” for the band.
