Jennifer Garner says she did not know that her character in Dallas Buyers Club was fictional. She talks about her research for the film
What surprised you most about the storyIJ
To play this doctor, I went back and read everything I could find from ‘81-‘82 to about ‘88-‘89 — all the medical journals, everything fed to the public, everything I could find having to do with HIV and AIDS. With medical journals, it’s like reading something in Greek. It’s a whole other language. I don’t know how much went in, but after enough hours, I did start to be able to say, ‘Okay. This puzzle piece wasn’t here back then. They hadn’t found this yet.” In all the research I did, I never saw Buyers Club mentioned once. So I think it’s pretty cool that there’s history happening around us all the time on the fringes or right in front of us or wherever it is, and we don’t always have the full story.
What was the most surprising thing you discovered about your characterIJ
My character is an amalgam of several people. They did not tell me that. And so, I spent a long time trying to find her on the microfilm at the library, and Googling, and looking her up, and reading all these journals, and saying, ‘Gosh, they talk about this specific journal in the movie and she’s not in there anywhere.’ I finally called them and said, ‘I am so embarrassed. I cannot find Eve Saks,’ and they said, ‘Oh, we forgot to tell you, she’s made up.’ That never occurred to me. I thought it was really true. So, Eve Saks as such did not exist. But imagine the pressure the medical industry was under at that time to come up with something, an answer, just answers at all, any kind of cure, any kind of explanation, anything to help prevent it. Reading even Time magazine from that time period, you’re reminded of the huge fear and the incredible bigotry that showed its ugly face, that was probably already there, but it reared its face because of that fear and loathing, and how much people were isolated who had anything to do with the disease. It was a huge thing to be a doctor working with HIV and AIDS patients because you didn’t know. You used to go in in hazmat suits. You didn’t know if you could catch it from being in the same room. It was a big deal.
What was your experience when you first saw the filmIJ
I saw it at home on my computer screen sadly (laughs). But I was so proud of Matthew and Jared. That was how I felt. I knew that Jean-Marc was doing a good job, but I was really thrilled for him when I saw the film. In order to shoot it that quickly, and to make the kind of sense that he made from this really big story that crossed years and years and years, Jean-Marc had to be decisive. He had to be specific. He had to have all of this in his head the way any director does, but moving at warp speed. And he did. I mean, there were huge areas and things in the movie that if it had been a bigger movie, we would have had them in there.
They kind of leaned it towards the possibility that maybe there were romantic feelings between my character and Ron. Jean-Marc said, ‘You know, we do not need this. This is not this movie. This is too sentimental. let’s take it out. let’s not shoot any of this. No. We will not.’
When you first saw Matthew and Jared lose weight, what was your reactionIJ
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. 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. And then, the amount of weight he lost from that day over the next five weeks was just alarming. Whatever you see on screen, it was so much worse in person.And as gaunt as he was in the movie, that’s how he was all the time. He just put plumpers in his jeans and in his cheeks when he was trying to look more healthy and tanned himself. So he was that thin all the time. We would all feel better when he was wearing his plumpers, but we knew that they were fake.
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. I kept saying, ‘You know, my daughter has a cold and I made some homemade chicken soup and there’s nothing in it. Do you think…IJ’ and he’d go, ‘Nope.’ I just left them alone because it was really their journey and they didn’t want me pushing food on them. They were really trying to do something.
They never made a big deal about it. They both felt like this is so not the big part of this job, and it wasn’t. I have to say I feel like as much credibility as the weight loss gives their performances, their performances transcend the weight loss in my opinion.
I actually hated making this movie because I was so disturbed watching these boys do this to their body. I just wanted it to be over.
What are you working on nextIJ
I have one more movie before I really am taking a break and that’s Men, Women & Children with Jason Reitman.