To find that fortitude, McConaughey channeled a buddy’s real-life battle with cancer. If anything, he’s a selfish son of a bitch who’s doing what he can to survive.” “He doesn’t start off as this crusader for the cause,” McConaughey says. Jean-Marc Vallee, director of “C.R.A.Z.Y.” and “The Young Victoria,” tells the Texas cowboy’s story in this dramatized adaptation of his inspiring evolution from hard-edged homophobe to unlikely hero – and all from the perspective of a heterosexual man who thought only gay people got HIV. “The hard truth that I could see, and the way I approached it, was him getting HIV is what gave him his purpose in life,” says Matthew McConaughey from the Four Seasons Los Angeles at Beverly Hills, still looking slender after dropping 40 pounds to play Woodroof in the critically acclaimed dramedy “Dallas Buyers Club.” “That’s the first time that he had something that he grabbed ahold to for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day, until he was here no longer.
The party boy, who was given just 30 days to live after he contracted HIV in 1986, defied the odds – and, by smuggling anti-viral medications from across the globe into the U.S., helped others do the same.
Then, people were diagnosed and dead within days. The AIDS crisis reached a devastating peak in the mid ’80s, a time before cocktail therapies were sustaining life.
