Jennifer Garner has worked with many a star in her career. She has shared the screen with big names like Jared Leto, Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ben Affleck and played iconic characters like Elektra in Daredevil, Riley North in Peppermint, and Jenn Rink in 13 going on 30. However, there is one film the actress ended up hating working on, and that was Dallas Buyers Club.

Jennifer Garner in Dallas Buyers Club

Dallas Buyers Club has a very deep story that focuses on one of the greatest problems in America in the 80s: AIDS. The film scared Garner to the point where it was difficult for her to engage with her co-star Matthew McConaughey.

What is Dallas Buyers Club about?

Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club

Dallas Buyers Club is a biographical film directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, following the life of real-life American citizen Ron Woodroof. Woodroof was the progenitor of the Dallas Buyer Club, an organization created at the height of the AIDS pandemic in the USA in the mid-80s.

The object of the club was to supply medicine that was illegal to possess in the state of Texas while also being banned by the FDA. This drug was used to treat the symptoms of AIDS, becoming extremely important for those suffering from the disease, especially in the era when such a medicine was highly stigmatized.

Also starring in the film, as mentioned, was Jennifer Garner as a fictional character, along with Jared Leto, who, like Garner, played a fictional composite character based on interviews with transgender people suffering from the epidemic. Before the film began to shoot, Garner met McConaughey, which ended up scaring her so much that she couldn’t help but hate working on the film.

Why was Jennifer Garner terrified of Matthew McConaughey?

Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Speaking with Collider about working with McConaughey, Garner talked about the harrowing experience, as she had to witness not one, but two of her co-stars shed a drastic amount of weight, so much so that she had to excuse herself just so she could collect her thoughts after meeting McConaughey. The actress said:

“Well 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” [took a deep breath] 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.”

McConaughey was very particular about the role, so much so that it won the actor an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in the 86th Academy Awards. Along with him, Jared Leto, who similarly went through his own weight loss journey, won the award for Best Supporting Actor.