Why Sexiest Man Alive Matthew McConaughey Likes to Look His Worst in Gold

This Time Matthew McConaughey Gains Weight, for Gold

Matthew McConaughey famously, and dangerously, wasted away to play a drug hustler with AIDS for his Oscar-winning turn in "Dallas Buyers Club."

Now he packs on the pounds and loses a lot of hair to channel another hustler, Kenny Wells, a down-on-his-luck prospector who rises from the dusty bars of Reno to the upper echelons of Wall Street in "Gold."

"Fun," says McConaughey of his latest physical transformation. "It's in service of the guy Kenny Wells. I didn't plan on putting on a bunch of weight. I just started living like Kenny and all of a sudden looked up in the mirror and I was getting kind of big. I was like: Well, this is the guy. And so down that road we went."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPwpM7IMR4s&t=2s&list=PLaE1vFjVg7POerMZtvAn3RugGAxDlRXDm&index=10

Matthew McConaughey Serves as Producer and Star of Gold

Also a producer on the film, McConaughey tells Made in Hollywood reporter Damaris Diaz that he took on the project because he related to the main character.

"I grew up meeting guys like Kenny Wells through my father, was privy to deals that my dad would make with guys like Kenny Wells," says the Texas-raised actor. "My dad had some Kenny Wells in him: Hard-living, hustlers, at the bottom of the barrel, but optimistic as a survival mechanism, every single day to say, Today is going to be the day. And it usually wasn't. But you get up again tomorrow and you do it again and you say it again and you believe it again. And most of them never found their 'gold.' They never made it. But this is the story about a guy chasing down the American dream and did find it."

McConaughey also was drawn to the rags-to-riches story.

"Look at the dynamic," he says. "We don't even know what the character is and you say, We're going to follow a guy from the dusty bars of Reno to the jungles of Indonesia to the top floor in Wall Street. Well, I want to know, What story and who's going to take us to those places? On a producing level, that's already a dynamic landscape. ... And then to follow this guy, who starts when you meet him at the very bottom, and get to the very top, by hook or by crook, hustles his way in, makes it happen, almost wills it to happen, that's fun."

Why Sexiest Man Alive Matthew McConaughey Likes to Look His Worst in Gold

And so, says the former People magazine "Sexiest Man Alive," he ha no problem looking his worst on screen.

"The guys I met didn't have dentists. The guys that I met that were Kenny Wellses, you chip you front tooth, you Super Glue it back and you don't flinch and it's no big deal," he says. "Guys like Kenny Wells are too busy hustling and surviving to sit there and look in the mirror or have concerns with what they look like. They're too busy trying to hustle."