Dallas Buyers Club- Behind The Scenes

Picture taken off of Google

The movie that I am going to be discussing this week is Dallas Buyers Club. This movie came out in 2013 but I think the preparation the actors went through to achieve the characters of this movie is worthy to mention and write about. This movie  won best motion picture at the 71st Golden Globes. In the 86th Academy Awards and 71st Golden Globes, Matthew McConaughey won best actor and Jared Leto won best supporting actor. However, what were the challenges to make this movie? What did the actors go through to achieve their characters goal?  

To start off, I once again watched countless of interviews and read many articles to truly find the obstacles the director and actors went through, and the first one I found was that it took 20 years for anyone to take on the movie, it was rejected a total of 137 times. When it was finally done the film was faced with the budget of only $5 million, with that the makeup artists only had $250 to turn the actors into their real life counterparts. To top that off, the cast and crew had only 25 days to film the entire movie. 

As for Matthew McConaughey, who plays a homophobic man that was diagnosed with HIV and Jared Leto, a transsexual with HIV that turns into AIDS, both had to lose an immense amount of weight. McConaughey lost nearly 50 pounds by restricting his diet to only 5 ounces of fish and a cup of vegetables twice a day. He exercised each day burning 1,800 calories each day for two weeks straight. The actor himself had to invest his own money to carry out this movie. 

 Leto lost 30 or 40 pounds by simply not eating. Leto admitted it left him very fragile because his body changed drastically, his final weight was about 114- 116 lbs. He really wanted to get into his role of a transsexual woman that he went to hang out with transgender community to understand them and so he could his into the right mindset of his charactor Rayon. In order to stay in character Jared Leto spoke and acted like Rayon even when they weren't filming so as each day passed he could grasp his character even better. The change was so drastic that both actors made headlines everywhere after pictures of both of them in character surfaced.