Tomball woman was Petty’s Alice in Wonderland
It’s been a little over 30 years since she stared down the rabbit hole of rock superstardom, but Louise Foley-Cohen is still introduced to people as that girl from the Tom Petty video.
If you’re a child of the ’80s, there’s a considerable chance you remember the video. Created for Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” it was a dreamy visual riff on “Alice in Wonderland” that was in regular rotation on MTV shortly after its 1985 release — back when the station still aired more videos than scripted content.
Foley-Cohen starred in the video as Alice, wearing a sky-blue, puffedsleeve dress topped with a white pinafore. Her lacy half-gloves provided an ’80s touch as she opened the video peering around giant mushrooms growing out of a mist-covered darkness. It was a benchmark of the video era, combining artifice and surprise in a 4:36 clip that included FoleyCohen “screaming” as her character was turned into cake and served to the Mad Hatter (a bespectacled Petty) and his crew of Heartbreakers.
“At the time, I didn’t think it was that hot,” said Foley-Cohen, who now lives in Tomball. She was just an actress looking for work, and signed on for a job that became iconic.
In the days since Petty’s passing from cardiac arrest, Foley-Cohen’s starring turn in one of the musician’s most memorable music videos has reignited interest in the role.
“It’s mind-blowing that people still talk about it,” she said.
Foley-Cohen, 53, was a pioneer back in the video era, becoming one of the first actors to sign a contract to appear in a music video, as opposed to signing a modeling contract for the appearance.
She says she didn’t get to interact a whole lot with Petty but that she was always impressed during that three-day shoot with how he came alive when he got instruction from the video’s director, Jeff Stein.
Foley-Cohen says she approached the job as an actress, and her direction from Stein was to “use the set,” so you see her in the video all wide-eyed and surprised at the oversize chairs and cups or Petty’s towering hat.
“I just got into the character of Alice in Wonderland in the rock ’n’ roll world. The innocence and sweetness of Alice in a hard-core rock ’n’ roll world,” she said about her approach to the performance.
But, at the time, some of the thinking behind the video was lost on her.
“That was the whole thing with Dave Stewart sitting on the mushroom, and honest to God I didn’t notice until later that what he had done was picked up part of the mushroom and he gave it to me, and so (the video) was like a psychedelic trip, ” she said.
Stewart, of the Eurythmics, co-wrote and helped produce the track, which appeared on Petty’s “Southern Accents” record.
Rock lore has suggested that the song’s inspiration came from Stevie Nicks telling Joe Walsh the title phrase after a night of partying. But FoleyCohen doesn’t share any decadent, backstage rock stories here, even though she spent a good portion of her 20s seeing Petty do his thing on tour — she dated Petty’s former drummer Stan Lynch for five years, sometimes joining the band on tour.
Foley-Cohen says what she learned about Petty during that time was that he was a soft-spoken, Southern guy. “But when he spoke there was just kind of a wisdom about him, truly. I have great respect for the man,” she said.
The mom of four who moved from New Mexico six years ago also appeared in another of Petty’s music videos, “Make It Better (Forget About Me),” which began with Foley-Cohen’s smiling face before a miniaturized Petty crawls into her ear canal to perform the song with his Heartbreakers.
More than just a musicvideo girl, Foley-Cohen appeared in some afterschool TV specials and had recurring roles on the sitcom “Family” and the daytime soap opera “Santa Barbara.”
Today, she works on short films and performs with theater groups in the area, getting calls from local production companies when they “need an older woman.”
“I just do it because I love it,” she said.
Foley-Cohen says she’ll always cherish her connection to Petty and his music, even if she never gets to play down the label of being “that girl from the video.”