Why Jennifer Garner “hated” working with Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto: “I was so disturbed”
Although Jennifer Garner has starred in a collection of lauded movies in her time, none are as hard-hitting as Jean-Marc Vallée’s 2013 release, Dallas Buyers Club.
Notably, the film is a biographical drama that tells the story of Ron Woodroof. Played by Matthew McConaughey, Woodroof was diagnosed with AIDS in the mid-1980s, a time when the disease was intensely stigmatised and poorly understood. As part of the experimental AIDS treatment movement, Woodroof smuggled unapproved pharmaceutical drugs into Texas to treat his symptoms, where he distributed the drugs to fellow sufferers under the ‘Dallas Buyers Club’. Whilst navigating these issues, he also faces opposition from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in his struggles to make life easier for his newfound community.
Notably, McConaughey stars alongside Jennifer Garner and Jared Leto in the movie, who play two fictional supporting characters, Dr. Eve Saks and Rayon, respectively. As both McConaughey and Leto played characters with AIDS in the film, they went to extreme lengths to portray how physically ill they were. The alarming nature of their transformations affected Garner so much that she would later reveal that she “hated” working on the movie.
“Well, Matthew, we’d all been seeing him lose weight in pictures before he ever got the job. And then, I went down to New Orleans to do a camera test, and I saw him,” Garner told Collider in 2013. “I knew he was in there. I chatted with him and was totally normal, and then I went into another room and went, ‘Uhhhh’, and collected myself because it gave me the shakes to see him look so ill.”
Garner then discussed Jared Leto’s method acting, which saw him go one step further than McConaughey and simply starve himself. “Jared, on the other hand, got the job and just stopped eating. And Jared, you just couldn’t look at him because, as another human being, all you thought was, ‘I need to get some chicken broth in this boy.’ I just wanted to feed him,” she said.
Witnessing her two co-stars in such psychical dire straits made Jennifer Garner’s time on the set of Dallas Buyers Club an intense one. She was so disturbed by their behaviour that she told Collider that she “hated” making the movie and could not wait for it to be over. “I hated it. I actually hated making this movie – and I never say that – because I was so disturbed watching these boys do this to their body. I just wanted it to be over,” she concluded.
Watch the trailer for Dallas Buyers Club below.
