There often comes a time for popular actors, where their unceasing pursuit of fame and success - spurred on tirelessly by their agents, managers and the big studios bankrolling their features - begins to draw diminishing returns. They keep following the trail of studio breadcrumbs - a bad buddy cop action movie here, a horrendous romcom there - doing everything they are being advised to do, but eventually, the idle begins to wane and sputter and suddenly, it just conks out. No more big, glossy national features, no huge publicity buildup to their next movie and, most importantly, no big scripts seem to come their way.
The thing is, if you are of a certain mind and disposition, you can completely turn these Hollywood horse latitudes to your advantage but only if you let this process free you of the shackles of fame-mongering. Such actors can then turn to darker, more complex roles, exploring characters far outside their previous boundaries and standards. If they are lucky enough to be successful with this, if they can wean their fans of the expectations for what they were previously known for, a rare few can attain a kind of bulletproof indestructibility, able to choose any role they’re interested in, big studio or micro-indie, foreign or domestic, and the public will happily accept them.
Such is the case with Matthew McConaughey. After being touted as a gorgeous, charismatic superstar-in-the-waiting near the start of his career, starring in John Grisham’s A Time to Kill in 1996 right after the female-friendly Boys on the Side among other similarly broad-minded fare, the fire quickly petered out. By 2000, he was reduced to making bland romcoms (The Wedding Planner) and misbegotten action flicks (Reign of Fire) and by the mid-2000s he seemed resigned to a series of dismal lothario roles (Fool’s Gold, Two for the Money, Failure to Launch) before eventually settling into a haphazard career of loosely governed cameos and Lifetime channel movies. But a funny thing happened between McConaughey’s seeming career flame out and complete irrelevancy: He returned to his roots and started making lower-budget flicks, choosing roles with such wild abandon, it was hard to keep up.
Unencumbered by his movie star looks, McConaughey appeared in ever more dark and dire roles, unafraid of the ramifications of his playing a loathsomely twisted detective-cum-hired-assassin (Killer Joe) or an over the-hill stripper, desperately trying to hang on to the last vestiges of his youthful attractiveness (Magic Mike). Having chucked any sense of conventionality in his career, he opened the door to take on any role that attracted him, and the results have been nothing short of spectacular. Best of all, this “new” McConaughey was actually nothing of the sort; it was a much welcome return to his counterculture roots.
And so it is, suddenly in the movie star catbird seat, that McConaughey could be the lead in a film such as Dallas Buyers Club and attack a role as complex as Ron Woodroof, the extremely heterosexual Texas cowboy stricken with AIDS who died back in 1992, but not before challenging the Food and Drug Administration system of drug approval and creating a massive market for new, as-yet-untested HIV drugs that he imported from all over the world, distributed via his business venture hinted at in the film’s title.
THAT LEAN AND HUNGRY LOOK
The first thing that jumps out at you about McConaughey’s performance is how much less of him there is to watch. For the part, the famously buff and robust actor essentially locked himself in his house with his family for several months and lost 47 pounds - finally leveling off at a shocking 135, down from his standard 182. Even, months later, in Toronto for the film’s early press tour, he was still gaunt. It’s a shocking transformation, and to hear him talk, he knew exactly what he was going for: “I could kind of get a gauge from people I hadn’t seen in a while,” he says. “Early on, it was ‘Hey, man, you losing a little weight?’, later it went to ‘Everything alright?’ and then the last one was ‘Oh, my God, you’re sick’ and I was like that’s it. That’s where it is.”
Still, if ever you had any doubt about the physical differences between the average citizen and a Hollywood megastar, you may consider the manner in which McConaughey lost all this weight. Essentially, he sealed himself up and laid low: “I was a bit of a hermit at the time anyway,” he explains, “because I damn sure didn’t want to take a meeting at my favorite steak house and put myself under that temptation. I stayed at home and stayed out of the sun. I controlled my meals. I stayed in and that was it.”
Maddeningly enough, it turns out for McConaughey, the weight was far easier to lose than to regain. “The challenging part about taking it off was like the challenging part of exercise; putting your shoes on is the hardest part.So I got to the weight, and I thought that’s good, that’s the weight I want to stop at and I didn’t stop losing weight. I started eating more, but my body had already committed on a cellular level, so I kept losing weight, and I started wolfing down food and I still kept losing. I had to eat more to get it to stop.”
But his tremendously affecting weight-loss is far from all he brought to the production. In the time he holed up, he was also intensely studying the man (“getting to know Ron” is how he puts it) and having long Skype conversations with Jean-Marc Vallee, the French-Canadian director of the film, meticulously working scene-by-scene through the script. “I was throwing everything I could at him, and we’d rewrite scenes,” he says. “He’s a great listener, gets really convinced of something but at the same time that he’s at the height of his conviction, if my conviction was different or more clear to me, he’d take a minute and go, ‘Yeah, yeah, now I understand that.’ He put his ego on the side.”
Above all else, it was of supreme importance to McConaughey and Vallee that they not neuter Woodroof’s character, transform him into some sort of saintly activist who realized the error of his ways and became completely altruistic in the process. “One of the things I really liked about this story was keeping the anarchy of this guy, keeping the blasphemous bastard throughout. Not having that third act turn where you have the character go, ‘Oh, my God, woe be my ways. I was wrong, I was lost, now I’m found.’ We never wanted to have that.”
If Woodroof becomes better educated about the disease, it’s strictly for his own benefit and when he forms the buyers club and begins importing medicines, it’s largely for his own survival and a business venture that proved to be quite lucrative. “We stuck with the idea that this guy is a businessman, trying for self-preservation,” McConaughey says. “I was always like, if we stick to this guy and he’s human, his humanity is going to be revealed.”
It’s a very welcome approach for a film that could otherwise have easily leaked with treacle. Woodroof ends up taking a deeply affected drag queen (played by an equally spindly Jared Leto, returning to film for the first time in years) as a business partner and learning to care about her deeply, but mostly because she proves useful to his bottom line. There are no tearful deathbed confessionals in the film, no over-the-top emotional breakthroughs we have to endure. The characters live and some of them die but for the most part, the film works hard not to treat them as grand symbols of lessons learned. And McConaughey’s performance, full-bore as it is, is nothing short of Oscar-worthy. He will at least almost certainly be nominated, which is a testament to his talent and willingness to take his career in whatever direction suits him at the time.
His next film, by contrast, is the intensely secretive new megabudget Christopher Nolan venture, Interstellar, with Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine and Casey Affleck. It’s a grand re-entry into the kind of role that suggests superstardom, if he wants it to be, but meanwhile this small indie film seems to have provided him with a perfect outlet.
“If I can get a role like this,” he rhapsodizes, “a full on immersion where I don’t have to look in the rear view mirror and can put the blinders on for six months, that’s ideally fun. It’s more than just dressing up and hollering; it’s ‘Don’t act like the guy, go be the guy.’”
MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 11/29/2013