No one deserves the Best Actor Oscar more than Matthew McConaughey. Then, again, the same could be said about Bruce Dern, Christian Bale, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Chewitel Ejiofor. All did outstanding work this year. All five men have enjoyed distinguished careers and can point to ample numbers of critically admired portrayals. What's an Academy Awards voter to do? We'll have to wait until Sunday to find out. In the meantime, here's what McConaughey, 44, had to say about his work in "Dallas Buyers Club" when he spoke to Dave Karger at a recent screening.
On McConaughey's relationship with the family of Ron Woodroof, the character he plays:
They opened their home to me. They opened every scrapbook they had... They did not sugarcoat who he was. The sister said he stole two of her cars twice, took all of her valuables. But then they said, you couldn’t help but love him. They were very honest about who he was... They said we have something we feel you should have, and then they gave me his diary, which was the diary he kept before he had HIV. That was really my secret weapon.
McConaughey explains what he means by "secret weapon":
As an actor you want to be seeing it from the inside. You want a secret. That [the diary] was my secret , the thing I had on my side. I ddidn’t share that with anyone else. There were certain excerpts that I would bring up to {director] Jean-Marc Vallee along the way that sometimes were added or improved, but it’s something that’s mine. And it was me and him. It was the thing that allowed me to be like, "There’s no way I could go wrong or tell and untruth in a scene," which is a great feeling to have when you’re going In to play a role.
On the difficulty of getting the film made:
It was around for 20 years. It got rejected 137 times… No way [it was going to get made, it's a] period piece, AIDS drama, with a bigoted hero. It’s not putting change in your pocket.. I wanted to do it. They said great, but no one’s going to finance it. A year went by, another year went by, and finally we set the date. People said again there’s no one to finance it. We said, "Fine, we’ll do it. We’ll get the money."
Jean-Marc comes on. We have the director, the lead, pieces are starting to come together. The producers didn’t flinch... We did believe that the film was real. We had a start date. We had locations. We had crew. And then at five weeks out the money fell out. It never went into escrow. I never asked if it was going to happen... At the time I didn’t have doubts. It’ll happen this fall, Nov. 1. There’s something about not pausing… We’re doing it in November.
