Matthew McConaughey read Ron Woodroof’s diary

Matthew McConaughey couldn’t find Ron Woodroof’s voice in ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ until he read his diary.

The 44-year-old actor plays the AIDS patient in the biographical drama directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, but he admits he struggled to show the true side of Woodroof to start with until he started digging into his past and found the ”secret weapon”.

He told the Belfast Telegraph newspaper: ”His [Woodroof’s] family gave me his fairy and it was the diary he kept before he got HIV. That gave me his monologue, this dialogue he was having with himself. Because the tapes were from after he had the Dallas Buyers Club.

”The diary was: ‘I got nothing to do. I got up again this morning, six o’clock. I had my coffee. I tucked my shirt in, pressed my pants, waited for my pager to go off, to get a call, get a little job done and nobody called. So damn it – I got to get high.’

”Seeing who he was before he got HIV really informed me because here is a guy who turned 30 days of life, as he was told, to seven more years. That was the first time when he had purpose in his life, ironic because he was having to fight for his life.”

The hunky star also credits a friend, who he has chosen to keep anonymous but has since died, for helping him get into role because he watched him battle against cancer until he had nothing left to give.

He added: ”He was going through a battle with cancer and, as the cancer starting eating his body away, I saw his fight coming out more ferociously, not receding.”