Jared Leto Explains How He Lost 40 Pounds: ‘I Stopped Eating’

Jared Leto’s first movie role in five years required the actor to lose more than 100 pounds. Leto plays a transsexual with AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club, and his role earned rave reviews when it debuted at the Toronto Film Festival on Saturday night.

Speaking to TheWrap, Leto explained how he lost the required weight.

“I stopped eating. It was 30 or 40 pounds. After a while I stopped counting.”

When all was said and done, Leto lost 114 pounds. Asked how the weight loss changed him, Leto said, “It changes the way you walk, the way you sit, the way you think.”

Matthew McConaughey also shed much of his own weight but he did so by watching what he ate rather than through a period of starvation.

The film is about Ron Woodruff (McConaughey), a Texas electrician who has HIV but is determined to go around the medical establishment in order to find treatment for himself and others affected with the virus.

In the film, Leto plays an AZT drug patient who eventually joins Woodruff in smuggling alternative drugs out of Mexico.

Also starring in the film is Jennifer Garner, who plays a nurse attempting to help AIDS patients through regularly established medical practices.

Leto, the lead singer of Thirty Seconds To Mars, has spent the last half-decade touring with his band while selling millions of albums around the world.

According to Jared Leto, he promised his band manager that he would only take a break from recording and touring if he found a movie script that he truly fell in love with.

Both Leto and Matthew McConaughey showed up at the premiere looking healthy.

Do you think Leto’s and McConaughey’s rapid and unhealthy weight loss went too far for their roles?