INHABITING GREATNESS:
FILM Earning their recent Oscar nominations didn’t come easy for Dallas Buyers Club stars Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, writes Steven Zeitchik.
Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto’s extreme new film.
THE STRIPPERS were gyrating and the smoke machine was spewing its vaporous mist, but Matthew McConaughey just kept on staring straight ahead.
Gaunt and moustachioed, the actor called for another shot of Johnnie Walker – if he meant a prop liquid, the bartender didn’t seem to know it – and tightened his facial muscles almost to the breaking point.
‘‘Man, if you’re up there, you better be listening,’’ McConaughey whispered, candles from the table in front of him flickering shadows on his contorted face as he halfbeseeched, half-ordered the heavens. A man with a camera on his shoulder lay sprawled out on the club’s stage, the lens poking between a dancer’s legs and aimed squarely at the actor’s face. ‘‘Send me a sign.’’
A native son of Texas, McConaughey has convincingly inhabited a number of hereticalyet-charming cowboys in his twodecade film career. But as his intense focus and startling appearance in the strip-club scene for Jean-Marc Vallee’s Dallas Buyers Club demonstrates, he’s never gone to as dark a place with his character – or as extensive a method with his preparation – as he has in the Aids drama, which centres on a real-life man named Ron Woodroof.
As the movie ups the dramatic quotient for McConaughey, it also poses questions about the benefits – and limits – of such preparation. Matching his singleminded focus in the film is Jared Leto, the actor-turned-rocker who returned to acting after a five-year hiatus to play Rayon, a transgender Aids patient who becomes Woodroof’s unlikely friend and business partner. Like McConaughey, he’s earned an Oscar nomination for his character’s authenticity, but underwent an equally fraught process.
Dallas Buyers stars McConaughey as Woodroof, a homophobic Texas electrician who was diagnosed in the mid1980s. Stunned, he began importing unapproved treatments, prolonging thousands of lives in the process.
To embody their characters, McConaughey consulted Woodroof’s diary heavily during the shoot, while Leto wore high heels continually – even, sometimes, in his trailer. Both men dropped significant amounts of weight to persuasively play sick people.
"It’s one of the most extreme transformations I ever made," said Leto, no stranger to radical metamorphoses, having taken on junkie mannerisms in Requiem for a Dream and gaining 27 kilograms to play John Lennon’s killer in Chapter 27. ‘‘But it’s not about just ‘living as the person’ or some kind of affect, like a lot of people seem to believe. It’s about developing a level of concentration without having to wait for permission for a director to yell, ‘Action.’’’
McConaughey knew early on he wanted to immerse himself in the part. But after trying to get the film made for nearly three years – the project itself has a development history that dates allowed me to understand how he might be thinking in moments like the strip-club scene.’’
Though the Rayon character is a screenwriter’s construct, Leto became similarly submerged. After nabbing the role from a skeptical Vallee by appearing in a Skype audition in character as Rayon, he, too, lost weight – about 13.5kg – and consciously changed his walk and his muscle movements. He moved his rockstar voice to an alto register, inspired by scores of conversations with transgender individuals.
The goal was to create a crossdressing character who, though flamboyantly expressive, defied the stereotype of the on-screen drag queen.
‘‘A lot of the time in movies we see the drag queen dancing on the table with a feather boa, screaming a clever line and running out of the room. I didn’t want to do that,’’ he said. ‘‘I wanted to bring a real person to life.’’
On set, Leto (who last shot a movie in 2007, the sci-fi
talked to crew members – when he talked at all – only as Rayon. (Vallee likes to joke that he only met Leto seven months after production wrapped, at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.) After a while, Leto said, ‘‘I even started dreaming as Rayon.’’