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When you hear the name Jared Leto, what image springs to mind? A green-haired, tattooed maniac? A balding fashion scion? A gaunt, gangrenous heroin addict? (Unless you’re a Thirty Seconds to Mars fan, in which case maybe you picture lead singer Leto berating a crowd member.)
Even among the ranks of beautiful movie stars who enjoy working incognito — think Charlize Theron in “Monster,” Christian Bale in “The Machinist” and “Vice,” Colin Farrell in “The Batman” — the 50-year-old Leto is in a class by himself in the lengths he’ll go to for his extreme on-screen makeovers. In his latest film, Marvel’s “Morbius,” Leto throws himself into the part of Dr. Michael Morbius, a biochemist who inadvertently makes himself into a vampire when a life-saving experiment goes wrong.
“I got scared for Jared,” the film’s director, Daniel Espinosa, has said. “He really commits. You have to watch out for it.”
Now that Daniel Day-Lewis has retired, Leto might just be Hollywood’s preeminent shapeshifting Method actor. Read on for a timeline of his wildest role transformations, and what he did to achieve them.
‘Requiem for a Dream’ (2000)
Darren Aronofsky’s nightmare thriller about addiction starred Leto as Harry Goldfarb, a young man in Brooklyn who gets hooked on heroin along with his girlfriend (played by Jennifer Connelly) and his best friend (Marlon Wayans). Though he’d already appeared in a number of movies, including “Prefontaine” and “Fight Club,” this was the one that saw Leto really dig into extreme transformation for the first time.
Leto has said he lost a substantial amount of weight for the role, as well as spent time with junkies in downtown New York. “I did whatever I thought I could do in order to bring more authenticity to the role, more honesty … So I spent time with a group of people in the East Village, many of whom are no longer alive — they lost their battles to addiction. They were very supportive and helpful and generous with their time and their experiences and there were nights that I spent basically homeless,” Leto told Vulture for an oral history of the film in 2020.
The weight loss, he was careful to stress, was “my idea, and I thought that given the circumstances, given my own personal experiences around addiction and addicts, it was appropriate, physically, that [the character would] be in that place. I also thought that if I lost a lot of weight and was restricting my food intake, that would put me in a place of constant craving. I thought that was a good place to be.”
‘Chapter 27’ (2007)
Seven years later, Leto swung wildly in the other direction to play Mark David Chapman, the man who killed John Lennon. The actor has said he put on 62 pounds to play the killer (though some accounts have put it at 67 pounds), partially by drinking microwaved pints of chocolate ice cream that were mixed with olive oil and soy sauce. He also got sick from gaining so much weight so quickly, he’s said. “I got gout, and my cholesterol went up so fast in such a short time that my doctors wanted to put me on Lipitor, which is for much, much older people,” Leto told the Guardian in 2014. About accepting the role, Leto said, “I had some reservations because I love everything John Lennon ever did. But in the end, I wanted to explore a specimen embodying the total failure of humanity, just walk down this brutal path.”
‘Dallas Buyers Club’ (2013)
Leto swung back to weight loss for his role as the transgender, HIV-positive character Rayon in “Dallas Buyers Club.” It was a transformation that would win him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. “I lost around 40 pounds and then I stopped counting,” he told the Guardian
. “For me, it was about how it made me feel, how it made other people treat me. I got down to something like 114 pounds, and that was enough to do what I wanted it to do, which was to change everything about me.”
He also sought out transgender people and talked to them, which he said at the time “was the education and the start of it all. I’m really grateful for those experiences.” He stayed in character throughout the shoot. “Every morning, when I stepped out of that van that took us to set, I always had my high heels on,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
‘Suicide Squad’ (2016)
When Leto stepped into the iconic role of the Joker in “Suicide Squad” (not to be confused with 2021’s “The Suicide Squad”), it was a perfect match for his obsessive character-immersion brand. But his approach to the part didn’t go over well with all of his castmates. “He did some bad things, Jared Leto did. He gave some really horrific gifts,” Viola Davis told Vanity Fair. “He had a henchman who would come into the rehearsal room, and the henchman came in with a dead pig and plopped it on the table, and then he walked out. And that was our introduction to Jared Leto.”
Margot Robbie, who played his love interest Harley Quinn, received a live rat, which she kept. And Leto also joked to E! that he’d sent used condoms and anal beads to “everybody” in the cast, but later clarified that was “total bulls–t.”
‘Blade Runner 2049’ (2017)
A year later, Leto played the sinister genetic food magnate Niander Wallace in “Blade Runner 2049.” To play the blind character, he insisted on wearing milky-hued contacts that really obscured his vision. “He could not see at all. He was walking with an assistant, very slowly,” director Denis Villeneuve told the Wall Street Journal. “It was like seeing Jesus walking into a temple. Everybody became super silent, and there was a kind of sacred moment. Everyone was in awe. It was so beautiful and powerful — I was moved to tears.”
Still, the blind Leto admitted he missed out on some career milestones on that set. “All my scenes were with Harrison Ford, and I never laid eyes on him once,” he told Jimmy Fallon.
‘House of Gucci’ (2021)
To play Paolo Gucci, the flamboyant eccentric in Ridley Scott’s sprawling 2021 family drama, Leto turned to prosthetics to turn into a chubby, balding Italian fashion designer with a chip on his shoulder. The actor wore a bald cap plus eight prosthetic pieces — and demanded the hourslong application process take place off set, so he could arrive on set in character. “I did it all. I was snorting lines of arrabbiata sauce by the middle of this movie. I had olive oil for blood. This was a deep dive I did,” he told Vice. “Bringing Paolo to life was like birthing a bowling ball out of my sphincter.”
‘WeCrashed’ (2022)
Leto went straight from “House of Gucci” to “WeCrashed,” the Apple TV+ series about Adam Neumann, the charismatic, disgraced CEO of WeWork. With only a week between productions, Leto again dove into character and didn’t surface again until shooting was over, according to his co-stars. “He’s no slouch, that Jared Leto,” Anne Hathaway told Entertainment Tonight. “He came to set as Adam and I met him as [his wife] Rebekah.” She’s also told Men’s Health she couldn’t call him “Jared” during the shoot.
To master Neumann’s distinctive voice, Leto hired a team of five Israelis to help him hone his accent. And he worked with special effects artist and prosthetics expert Kazu Hiro to develop Neumann’s look, including darkening his naturally blue eyes. “This is a painting, not a photograph,” Leto said enigmatically, in an interview earlier this month about trying to evoke Neumann. “We did our best to bring an impression of this person to the screen. And, yeah, we had our tricks of the trade.”
‘Morbius’ (2022)
Leto’s latest role sees him playing Marvel’s “living vampire,” the Spider-Man foe Morbius.
His scientist character goes from being horrendously sickly to superpowered after a transfusion of vampire bat DNA — a transformation perfectly suited to Leto’s penchant for extreme physical immersion, as the actress playing his partner observed of his hunched, twisted posture. “I remember fearing for this guy’s spine. There should have been a physical therapist on call,” his co-star Adria Arjona told Variety. Leto even met with doctors and patients connected to the type of rare blood disease Morbius is suffering from. Espinosa has said Leto disappeared completely: “I almost never saw him getting into the role, it was more that Michael Morbius was on set. The moment he would exit his trailer, it would no longer be Jared Leto, and he would not want to be spoken to as Jared Leto. He’s a very committed actor.”
No matter how the film fares — and it’s getting some critical dings — Leto has confessed he’ll miss the character, as he does all of them. “For me, they’re like living, breathing people,” he told Variety. “I know they’re not, of course, but I get attached. It’s a shame to never do it again.”
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