Jennifer Garner was a part of the stellar cast that rounded out Matthew McConaughey’s Oscar-nominated film Dallas Buyer’s Club. But watching her fellow co-stars’ extreme physical transformations put her off making the film.
Jennifer Garner hated making ‘Dallas Buyer’s Club’ because of her co-stars’ method acting
Garner once found herself in the biopic drama Dallas Buyer’s Club starring alongside McConaughey and Leto. The film saw the two actors play characters diagnosed with AIDS. Because of the nature of their roles, McConaughey and Leto went through extreme lengths to portray these physically ill characters.
Garner, however, might not have been prepared for the transformations, and cringed when exposed to her co-stars.
“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 once told Collider. “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 further asserted that McConaughey’s new physique was much worse in person than it was on screen. But perhaps McConaughey’s method acting was only matched by Leto’s, who Garner revealed completely starved 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.
Seeing her co-stars in such a physical state soured her experience in the film.
“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 said.
Matthew McConaughey stopped Jennifer Garner from quitting ‘Dallas Buyer’s Club’
Garner came within a hair of quitting the prestigious film altogether. The actor had taken a long hiatus from acting to focus on the family she was raising with her ex-husband Ben Affleck. So when her agent brought Dallas Buyer’s Club her way, Garner realized she was faced with an ultimatum.
“My agent called me and said, ‘We’re either having a conversation about you taking this movie or about your retirement,’ because I had taken so much time,” she once told Tell Me More.
But because of Dallas Buyer’s Club’s fast-paced filming, Garner could barely find the time to breastfeed her children. Eventually, she felt the film was taking a toll on her duties as a mother.
“That first night on set, at the time when I was supposed to be putting my kids to bed, my breasts filled up,” she said. “My boobs were freaking out. It was bedtime, and we were doing some scene that was supposed to be light, and I started crying. And I was like, ‘I have to quit. I have to go home and be with my kids. I just can’t do this anymore.’”
Fortunately, McConaughey managed to provide some much-needed help for his co-star.
“Sweet Matthew McConaughey pulled me aside and said, ‘What is going on with you?’ And from then on, whenever I needed to, I would give him a hi sign, and I would go take care of it,” Garner remembered. “He said, ‘You can do both. You’ve got it. You can do it.’ How much do I love that guy?”
Jennifer Garner felt her co-stars stole her thunder with their weight loss
Garner didn’t go to the lengths that McConaughey and Leto did for the film. But the actor reminded others that she also went through her own transformation for Buyer’s Club. In an interview with Jimmy Kimmel Live (via Daily Mail), she joked about the double standard between herself and her co-stars.
“All anybody says is, ‘All those boys lost 50 pounds,’” Garner said. “Do you know how much weight I lost before I did this movie? Fifty pounds. Has anyone given me a ticker tape parade? No!”
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