Has Jared Leto learned anything from walking a mile in his characters’ shoes?
The actor is known for going to extreme lengths of a role. Not just in his dubious “method acting” stunts (like sending castmates rats), but in his physical transformations. From going rail thin for his Oscar-winning role in Dallas Buyers Club to getting ripped for the upcoming Morbius to the entire fat suit/prosthetics situation in House of Gucci, he always commits one way or another.
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If you lined up a bunch of Jared Leto characters together, you might not even recognize them all as the same man. Oddly, the incredibly fit 30 Seconds to Mars frontman lamented his base-level youthful good looks in a new interview with Men’s Health, saying:
“Unfortunately, I’m not getting movie roles where I play, like, ‘a rather young-looking old man.’ Maybe I’m doing something wrong—not taking advantage of it enough. It just doesn’t matter. You can be 30 years old and live an amazingly exciting, interesting, fulfilling life, or you can be 60 and having a crisis.”
Is he saying he wishes he could just play a character who looks like him, at his own age (50)? It’s kind of unclear. But the physical demands of a role don’t matter to him much, anyway. He remarked:
“I’m thinking about the heart of the character, the soul, the spirit. Those other things — it’s the description.”
When the interviewer pointed out that he must have been thinking about his characters’ appearance a little, considering all the weight gain and weight loss and added muscle mass, he argued:
“But what’s more important is: How does it change the way you walk? How does it change the way you talk? How does it change the way people treat you? I gained over 60 pounds for a role once, and it was amazing. I remember asking someone for the time in New York and they, like, recoiled. I saw people I knew who didn’t know I was filming and thought I had fallen off the — I don’t know how to describe it—that I had ‘not been taking care of myself.’ They took it as a sign of something wrong in my life. It was a really wild thing to experience that.”
Uh, yeah, dude. This is the kind of stuff larger people — especially women — have to deal with all the time.
The role he’s referring to seems to be that of John Lennon’s murderer Mark David Chapman for the film Chapter 27. That came out in 2008. But despite experiencing fatphobia for himself firsthand, the My So-Called Life alum still committed to that fat suit (or similar prosthetics) for House of Gucci. The issues with fat suits have been well documented — and some Twitter users previously pointed out that he didn’t even have to wear one to accurately portray Paolo Gucci.
Finding out Jared Leto wore a fatsuit to play a guy who wasn't fat is going to rage-change my biology so penicillin will not work https://t.co/bZk5DA6SzS
— literary agent needing jerk (@rajandelman) November 27, 2021
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So far, Jared has not squared his personal experience with fatphobia to his personal experience perpetrating it via the fat suit. However, he did explicitly tell Men’s Health he has no regrets about any of the roles he’s taken on:
“No. Come on. I’m gonna be dead soon. Who gives a flying f**k?”
Well Jared, you may find that many, many people give a f**k about the concerning choices you’ve made as an actor over the years. But if you don’t care about any of it, that’s your prerogative!
[Image via NBC/MGM/YouTube]
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