McConaughey shoulders the weight of a leading man

AFTER 20 YEARS in Hollywood, Matthew McConaughey is having a moment.

Previously thought of as little more than a buff, pretty-boy actor who looked good in romantic comedies and without a shirt, McConaughey became a dad in 2008, turned 40 in 2009 and decided to get more serious about his craft and his career.

Goodbye "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past."

Hello "The Lincoln Lawyer," "Bernie," "Killer Joe," "The Paperboy," "Mud," "Magic Mike" and now "The Dallas Buyers Club." Different character roles, interesting directors, studio films mixed with eclectic art-house fare.

And in "Buyers Club," opening in Philadelphia today, McConaughey goes all out in the type of appearance-changing role that tends to make Academy voters drool. To take on the role of AIDS patient/businessman/drug "dealer" Ron Woodroof in 1985 Dallas, McConaughey shed 47 pounds off his already svelte frame, literally becoming the Ghost of HIV-transmitting Girlfriends Past.

"I kind of could get a gauge from people I hadn't seen in awhile," an almost-back-to-normal McConaughey said about his weight loss in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. He said it started with friends asking, "Losing a little weight?" Then it went to "Everything all right?"

"When it got to 'Oh my God, you're sick,' I was like 'That's it.' "

But the actor kept dropping the pounds.

"I didn't stop losing," he said. "I tried to. I started eating more. But my body had already committed on a cellular level, so I kept losing. That was at 47 pounds."

Although the weight loss was gradual for McConaughey and his family - one time his daughter said "Papa, why is your neck long like a giraffe?" - the rumor mill concocted wild stories.

"I heard, 'Oh he's sick'," he said. " 'He's got some disease so he's taking this role to use it as cover.' "

It probably didn't help that for nearly six months, McConaughey rarely left his house.

"I damn sure didn't want to take a meeting at my favorite steak house," he said. "I stayed at home, stayed out of the sun.

"This was what the role needed, so I just did that," he added. "I don't really worry about what I look like in front of the camera. If I'm going to be in a romantic comedy, it doesn't make sense to get down to 135 [pounds]. I'm not one to be eccentric for eccentricity's sake."

With his physical appearance set, McConaughey learned more about Woodroof and the buyers club scene at the dawn of AIDS, and tried to get inside the head of a homophobic character coming to grips with his "gay" disease and own mortality.

"The taboo on it now is nowhere near the extent that it was then," he said. "And it wasn't just in Texas. It was all over. No one knew what the hell this disease was. No one knew where it came from. There was quite a bit of phobia, and understandably so. Nobody knew. The doctors didn't know.

"And then I remember that Magic Johnson came out, and that was the first guy on the pulpit, and he was larger than life. And then there was the All-Star Game and people going, 'I'm not playing on the same court.' And they were called bigots, but I get their point. No one knew. Did you get it from shaking someone's hand? Is it saliva? Some of the phobia was unwarranted, but people didn't know."

As for the buyers club scene - paid memberships allowing drug providers to skirt the laws to provide experimental (usually foreign) medicines not approved by the FDA - McConaughey said, "There was a big buyers club in Dallas. There was a big one in New York. One out west in San Francisco. A big one in Florida. And these clubs were highly competitive. They weren't like, 'Hey, aren't we doing good?' They were like, 'I'm cuttin' you, man!' "

Keeping the edge in Woodroof and running the club more like a business than a charity is part of what appealed to McConaughey when he signed on. That and the mind-meld he was experiencing with director Jean-Marc Vallee.

"We had to do a lot of work in preproduction, because we had to shoot so fast," he said of the low-budget film. "Going over the script, [Vallee] introduced me to Skype. I didn't know what Skype was, but he didn't like the emails as much as talking to me in person. So we had many, many late nights discussing the script.

"There's always a time you hope to get to when you think you're making the same movie as the director, and one of the main things I liked about this was keeping the anarchy of this guy, keeping the blasphemous bastard throughout. Not having that third act turn where you have the character go, 'Woe be my ways. I was wrong. I was lost, now I'm found. I'm sorry.'

"We never wanted to have that violin movement. . . . And if a studio would have done the film, that moment would have been pushed for."

McConaughey said that the big thing he took away from the film is that "there's so much further man can go. The body is so much more resilient than sometimes we give it credit for. So is the mind. And if I can get a role like this, where it's a full-on immersion into an adventure, and I don't have to look in the rearview mirror, and I can put the blinders on for six months, that's ideal.

"That's fun about what we get to do. It's more than just dressing up on Halloween. Don't act like the guy. Go be the guy."