Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey: From hunk to reed thin

My son woke me up Monday morning to remind me to watch the Academy Awards live. It is not like I wait for it every year, but his prodding plus the excitement about it on Twitter intrigued me. Once Ellen Degeneres opened the show, I was hooked.

The first award was “Best Supporting Actor” which went to Jared Leto for Dallas Buyers Club. The last individual award was “Best Actor” which went to his co-star Matthew McConaughey. Both are celebrated hunks with fantastic abs (Matthew was last seen like this in  Magic Mike) but in Dallas Buyers Club, both actors shed up to nearly 50 pounds to portray dying AIDS patients. Both bagged the same awards as their Oscars from The Golden Globe and the Screen Actor Guild Awards.

Appropriately setting the tone for acceptance speeches, Jared Leto gave a short and stirring one. His portrayal of a transgender AIDS patient was his first movie role after a six-year acting hiatus.

Inspiring speech

Jared started with a story about a young, single woman living in Bossier City, Louisiana in 1971. “… who was pregnant with her second child. She was a high school dropout and a single mom, but somehow she managed to make a better life for herself and her children. She encouraged her kids to be creative and work hard and do something special. That girl was my mother and she’s here tonight. I just want to say I love you, Mom, thank you for teaching me to dream.”

Jared dedicated his Oscar to the millions of people who lost their lives to AIDS and the countless others who feel disenfranchised. “This is for the 36 million who have lost the battle to AIDS, and to those of you who have ever felt injustice because of who you are, or who you love. Tonight, I stand here in front of the world with you, and for you,” he concluded.

In his acceptance, Matthew explained his successful transformation from romcom heartthrob to a respectable actor.

“There’s three things, to my account, that I need each day: One of them is something to look up to, another is something to look forward to, and another is someone to chase,” Matthew said.

Matthew said he looks up to God, and thanks God for teaching him gratitude. Next, he thanks those in his life he looks forward to being with — his late father who taught him “how to be a man;” his mother, who taught him how to respect himself and others; and his wife and children for giving him courage.

“To my hero, that’s who I chase. When I was 15 years old, I had an important person in my life come to me and say, ‘Who is your hero?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I gotta think about that. Give me a couple weeks.’ I come back two weeks later and this person comes up ‘Who’s your hero?’ I said, ‘I thought about it, you know who it is? It’s me in 10 years,’” Matthew said. “So, I turn 25, 10 years later, and that same person comes to me and says, ‘So, are you a hero?’ And I say, ‘Not even close. No, no, no. My hero is me at 35.’”

Matthew won his first Oscar for portraying Ron Woodroof, a Texan who after being diagnosed with AIDS in 1985 began selling medications illegally to help others with the disease. Based on a true story, Ron then was given 30 days to live.

Matthew on losing weight

As a male stripper in the movie Magic Mike, Matthew showed off his buffed body.  In Dallas Buyers Club, he had to lose all that beef to become scarily thin.

“My daughter was looking at me, and she said, ‘Why is your neck long like a giraffe?’ The giraffe’s neck was the only comment I got from them. They saw the transformation day to day. Now, when I went to see someone who I hadn’t seen in months, that’s the people who would go crazy. It went from ‘Is everything alright?’ and then it got to ‘Are you okay?’ and the last one was, ‘Oh my God, you’re sick.’ At that point I thought Ron was just the weight he needed to be,” Matthew recounted.

Matthew lost a dramatic 49 pounds for the movie. He joins other actors whose dramatic weight loss won them acting trophies. Tom Hanks lost 20 pounds for Philadelphia, where he also portrayed an AIDS patient. He also bagged the Oscars that year. He also lost weight for Cast Away, for which he got the best actor award from The Golden Globe.

Christian Bale lost a third of his bodyweight to play drug-addict Dicky Eklund in The Fighter, winning best supporting actor in 2011. That same year, Natalie Portman won best actress for her role as troubled ballerina Nina in Black Swan after losing 20 pounds. Anne Hathaway lost 16 pounds for her best supporting actress Oscar-winning performance in Les Miserables in 2012. 

Matthew said his weight loss was gradual. Hence, his sons Levi, six, and Livingston, two, and daughter Vida, four, were unaware of the dramatic weight change. “I did it in as healthy a way as possible, I worked with a nutritionist and gave myself four months to do it. I didn’t do it in 20 days. I did it in four months and so, I gradually lost weight,” he said. “I think it would be more dangerous to put on 50 pounds, than to lose 50 pounds. Ask me in 10 years how it affected me.  It’s taken a long time to come back, the coming back is more dangerous than the losing.”

Matthew claimed he lost weight following an eating plan of Diet Coke, egg whites, and a piece of chicken (which surely did not come from a nutritionist).  The hard part, according to Matthew, was after losing so much weight he had trouble maintaining or even putting on weight. He began trying to eat more, but kept losing weight.

Matthew said: “My body had already committed on a cellular level, like, ‘no, we are going South’.” He finally managed to stop losing weight after slimming down by 49 pounds.

“Putting the weight on was more dangerous than taking it off. I’ll say that. I don’t know if it was more difficult. The challenging part about taking the weight off was like the challenging part of going to exercise, putting your shoes on is the hardest part. Once I said that’s what I’m doing, then I controlled my meals. I didn’t take meetings at the steakhouse. I stayed in and that was it,” Matthew relayed.

He told Jay Leno in an interview that he “was pretty much a hermit” for about six months before and during filming. “I ate my fish, my vegetables, and I had my wine,” said McConaughey — just much smaller portions. The actor estimated that he ate 1,700 or 1,800 calories a day to prepare for the role. He said he had five ounces of fish, a couple of vegetables twice a day, pudding in the morning, and “as much red wine as I’d like at night.”  The physical transformation and spartan diet (tapioca pudding was a staple) helped Matthew connect deeply with a character living well inside the margins.

“It outlined the sandbox I was going to play in. It was something regimented and it gave me singular focus. It changed my lifestyle. I measured how many hours of the day I would think about food. I love food and I love to cook about four hours a day. Well, I was like, ‘I’m not going to sit around and think about it, beat myself up.’ So I cut that desire out,” he said.  “Also, I’m a guy who likes the outdoors, but Ron needed to be pale. I stayed inside. And what did I end up doing? I wrote a lot, I read a lot. I became much more of a hermit and isolated myself and it was fun. It became a nice spiritual journey for myself.”

It took Matthew four months to gain three or four pounds a week. He is now up to 175 pounds but says he usually weighs around 182.

Jared’s weight loss

Ron’s gradual humanizing comes through his unlikely friendship with Rayon (Jared Leto), a Texas drag queen battling both AIDS and drug addiction. Rayon becomes Ron’s business partner in distributing the then-unheard-of remedies to mostly gay clients.

“I got seduced by Rayon,” quipped Jared. He took an unplanned six-year hiatus from the movies while he toured and recorded with his band Thirty Seconds to Mars. “Rayon came from my imagination. That character has been represented in film so many times it’s become a stereotype. I did not want to put a cliche onscreen. Members of the transgender community were great teachers .... I sought them out; I wanted to do it right. It’s still a challenging choice, but in 1985 to walk through a Dallas supermarket dressed as a woman ...” His voice trailed off but the effect on him was apparent.

Jared told Boston Globe he stopped counting after he lost 30 pounds for the role. “But I’ve done this before. I lost 25 pounds for Requiem for a Dream and gained 60 pounds for Chapter 27. It’s how it affects me on the inside that matters. It changes everything: how you walk, talk, laugh, breathe. It’s a transformative thing.”

He told Fox in an interview, “I lost around 40 pounds and then I stopped counting. For me, it was about how it made me feel, how it made other people treat me. I got down to something like 114 pounds and that was enough to do what I wanted it to do, which was to change everything about me.”

To get down to 114 pounds, “I stopped eating,” Jared told CNN, adding that such a drastic physical change had an impact beyond the scale.  “It changes the way you walk, the way you sit, the way you think,” the 41-year-old musician and actor said.

Jared said he would never lose weight for a film role again after his grueling diet for Dallas Buyers Club. He asserted he had no intentions to dramatically transform his body for a role in the future. 

However, he explained that he did not regret losing weight for his role as Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club, adding: “This time, I was playing someone who was not only addicted to drugs but also dying. When you lose weight, it’s not only about how you look, it’s how it affects you as a person, and your performance, and it changes so much about how you are. The fragility that all provides was essential to the part.”

Both Jared and Matthew showed focus, commitment, and sacrifice to get the results they want. May we draw inspiration from this to also have the firm resolve to transform ourselves to the fittest, healthiest, and strongest we can be.

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Post me a note at mylene@goldsgym.com.ph or mylenedayrit@gmail.com.