FILM · 2013 · USA
Dallas Buyers Club
- Directed by
- Jean-Marc Vallée
- Runtime
- 117 min
- Studio
- Truth Entertainment, Voltage Pictures, CE
20 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Nov 2026
Loosely based on the true-life tale of Ron Woodroof, a drug-taking, women-loving, homophobic man who in 1986 was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and given thirty days to live.
20 Interesting Facts About Dallas Buyers Club
Interesting Facts (12)
- #001
In its twenty years of making the rounds, the screenplay was turned down more than a hundred times.
- #002
Jared Leto stayed in character for the entire shoot; at one point he went grocery shopping as Rayon at a local Whole Foods and drew plenty of stares.
- #003
The film went through several incarnations before Matthew McConaughey helped get it financed. The first director-star pair to try were Marc Forster and Brad Pitt, then Craig Gillespie and Ryan Gosling, and Woody Harrelson was also attached at one point.
- #004
"Rayon" and "Eve" are invented characters with no real-life counterparts.
- #005
In the mid-1990s Dennis Hopper was set to direct, with Woody Harrelson as Woodruff, but the money never came through.
- #006
At one point Rayon calls Woodroof "Lone Star." Matthew McConaughey was in the film Lone Star (1996), played a Lone Star beer drinker in True Detective (2014), and is himself a native of Texas, "The Lone Star State."
- #007
On his way out of her office, Matthew McConaughey's character calls Jennifer Garner's character "Nurse Ratched"; that's obviously not her name, but the name of the villainous nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975).
- #008
Gael García Bernal was attached to a role at one point, but it never got as far as a deal.
- #009
People who knew Woodroof remember an eccentric, but say both the script and Matthew McConaughey's performance made him harder-edged than he was. According to the Dallas Morning News he was "outrageous, but not confrontational," and acquaintances felt the film's early portrayal of him as "rampantly homophobic" missed the mark.
- #010
In real life Ron Woodroof was openly bisexual, and he believed he had caught HIV from sex with men.
- #011
Based on a true story rather than a book, the film takes considerable creative liberties; Information is Beautiful rated it 61.4 percent accurate, more a character study than a faithful retelling.
- #012
The film shows Woodroof diagnosed in 1985, but he told screenwriter Craig Borten that a doctor had said he may have contracted the disease much earlier; Woodroof believed he might have been infected in 1981, which the film touches on briefly in a flashback.
Production Story (4)
- #013
The budget was so tight that the makeup budget was only $250. The makeup artists made it work, and the film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
- #014
Almost the whole film is lit with natural or practical light; the entire lighting package was two rarely used LED panels. Only two lenses were used, 35mm and 50mm, and the whole film was shot handheld, with takes running up to fifteen minutes. Rehearsals were skipped, and there was no post-production cycle meant to put the actors at ease.
- #015
Hilary Swank was cast but left the cast due to a scheduling conflict.
- #016
Despite the title, the film was not shot in Dallas.
Behind the Scenes (1)
- #017
In October 2021 Peter Staley, a longtime AIDS activist and founding member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power/ACT UP, published a memoir describing a conflict behind the scenes of this film. In 2012, a representative of director Jean-Marc Vallée, who knew Staley as a subject of the documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012), contacted him to offer a small role in Dallas Buyers Club. Staley was excited until he read the script (three weeks before shooting was due to start) and found it full of AIDS denialism and long-discredited, anti-science conspiracy theories. Among the examples: it promoted Dr. Peter Duesberg (the biology professor Discover magazine called "ostracized among scientists" for his false claim that HIV and AIDS are unrelated); it repeated long-discredited (and homophobic) early theories that gay men were more likely to contract HIV and that this was linked to the use of "poppers"; and its ending implied that Woodroof had been misdiagnosed with HIV (he hadn't) and that Peptide T was eventually approved by the FDA (it wasn't). Staley says that although Jean-Marc Vallée knew nothing of the history of AIDS denialism, he was willing to fix every error in the script, but that a meeting with Vallée and co-writers Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack made it clear Wallack was a conspiracy theorist who had written parts of the script to push that agenda. Staley managed to get most of the worst scientific inaccuracies changed before filming began.
Characters & Cast (2)
- #018
Matthew McConaughey lost 21 kilograms to play an AIDS patient; newspapers described him as "terribly gaunt" and "wasting away to skin and bones."
- #019
Jared Leto went on an all-liquid diet to lose weight fast for the film, saying he dropped ten kilograms in five days. As he told many interviewers, he started to feel like a different person, down to the way he talked and walked.
Deeper Meaning (1)
- #020
The film casts Ron Woodroof as a hero who knew something the medical establishment didn't, yet most of the drugs he smuggled and handed out through the buyers club were at best useless and at worst actively harmful, while the HIV/AIDS drugs he scorned were in fact the best treatments of their day. Daniel D'Addario wrote in Salon in November 2013: "The film's approach comes dangerously close to endorsing fake science," adding that it has a "selective way of dealing with [scientific] reality." Reporter Dylan Matthews, in a December 2013 Washington Post article titled "The things 'Dallas Buyers Club' gets wrong about the AIDS crisis," writes: "[Woodroof] and other characters accuse [AZT] of being 'poisonous,' and Woodroof advises buyers club clients to dispose of the AZT in their possession and never take it again… One could be forgiven for coming away [from the film] with the feeling that the medical community was poisoning them. The problem is that AZT was in fact a very effective treatment against HIV/AIDS. Jonathan Engel, a medical historian at Baruch College and author of the book 'Epidemic: A History of AIDS,' says, 'People who took AZT continuously lived a year longer.' That may not seem like much, but at a time when the disease had a 100 percent mortality rate, anything that delayed death was valuable." Matthews goes on to say most of the drugs Woodroof recommended were placebos: "'Almost everything he imported from Mexico would have been useless,' says Engel. One example is the experimental drug Peptide T. '[Woodroof] became an advocate of Peptide T and used it himself and believed in it himself,' says [Treatment Action Group co-founder Peter] Staley. 'It never worked. It's a useless therapy and it was never approved and nobody uses it today, but the film implies it helped him.'" Another drug Woodroof sold, "Compound Q," was actually dangerous: "Compound Q… backfired and at least two deaths in two trials were linked to it (one FDA-approved, the other conducted 'guerrilla-style' by activist Martin Delaney). Staley recalls, 'When it became clear it could kill people, the FDA tried to get buyers clubs to pull it, and everyone but Ron Woodroof pulled it.'"
Related pages
- Anthony Perkins — Dallas Buyers Club comes up in the facts on that page
- Runner — Dallas Buyers Club comes up in the facts on that page
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- Wikipedia
- IMDb
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