Dallas Buyers Club <\/em>was the movie that ushered in the McConaissance. <\/p>\n\n\n\nRead more about the McConaissance and Dallas Buyers Club <\/em>below. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDallas Buyers Club and the McConaissance<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nBack in 2007, Matthew had obtained the rights to the screenplay for Dallas Buyers Club<\/em>, and ever since then had wanted to play the lead role of Ron Woodroof. At the time, though, he couldn\u2019t find a director or producers (for financing) who\u2019d sign on to such a serious film with a rom-com actor like himself in the lead. But now, in January 2012, after his rebranding, it wasn\u2019t such a crazy idea. In fact, it was a dynamite one, and he couldn\u2019t wait to execute it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFirst, he secured the Canadian director Jean-Marc Vall\u00e9e, director of C.R.A.Z.Y.<\/em>, which Matthew loved. Then he began losing weight to play Woodroof. For five months, he lost two and a half pounds a week by eating a diet of three egg whites for breakfast and five ounces of fish plus a cup of steamed vegetables for lunch and dinner, supplemented by all the wine he wanted. He also studied Ron Woodroof\u2019s life carefully and started trying to get inside the man\u2019s headspace. To this end, he traveled to meet the man\u2019s sister and daughter, and they told him all about Ron, showing Matthew old VHS tapes and letting Matthew read Ron\u2019s diary. During this preparation, Matthew found his extreme weight loss\u2014from 182 to 135 pounds\u2014created an intensely focused mental state that helped him prepare for the role.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDespite the fact that his agent said there was no money for the project, Matthew insisted during preproduction that Dallas Buyers Club<\/em> would shoot in the fall of 2012. When the time finally rolled around, he, Vall\u00e9e, and the producers had managed to raise only $4.9 million of the projected $7 million budget. Even so, they agreed that they would go ahead and start filming, confident that the rest of the money would eventually appear. But in the end, it didn\u2019t. They made the movie in 25 days for $4.9 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDallas Buyers Club<\/em> was released in 2013 to a burst of Oscar buzz, which added momentum to a term that the press had started using some months earlier to refer to Matthew\u2019s cinematic resurgence: The McConaissance. Unbeknownst to anybody but him, this was actually a word that he had made up himself and fed to a journalist at that year\u2019s Sundance Film Festival, saying that he had just \u201cheard\u201d it from some other writer. This proved a successful ploy. The term stuck, and everybody started using it. And now, with people chattering about the Oscar-winning potential of the lead performance in Dallas Buyers Club<\/em>, it appeared the Matthew McConaughey Renaissance was only just getting started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What is the McConaissance? How did it change the course of Matthew McConaughey’s career? The McConaissance is a term that refers to Matthew McConaughey’s move from playing male leads in rom-coms to playing serious, more complex characters. Dallas Buyers Club was the movie that ushered in the McConaissance. Read more about the McConaissance and Dallas Buyers Club below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":35961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,33],"tags":[292],"class_list":["post-35941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-career","category-people","tag-greenlights","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"\n
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