“I hate the word fan”: Did Jared Leto really start a cult?
If there’s one film star in the industry who looks like he may well start a cult, and always has done, then it’s probably Jared Leto.
For one thing, he himself has admitted to taking inspiration from Jesus in terms of personal appearance, and many people have drawn attention to the movie star’s uncanny resemblance to the magic carpenter himself.
It’s probably not a surprise that when talking about being famous, something that Leto has been since all the way back to 1994 when he starred in the ‘privileged teen girls go on about how hard life is’ drama My So Called Life, he prefers not to refer to his followers as ‘fans’.
Instead, when discussing his band 30 Seconds to Mars’ audience he told the New York Times: “I hate the word ‘‘fan’’; it just seems so dismissive. Because we have this cult, this family, these believers who understand, it seems fitting that there was a name to reference them.”
So believers then, OK. To his credit, however, he did qualify the statement by stating the entry requirements as: ”You have to dance under the full moon and drink the freshly sacrificed blood of a human baby”, which means he probably wasn’t being entirely serious.
Then, there’s the flip side. The group’s ‘believers’ tend to be women, and they have decided to call themselves ‘The Echelon’, travelling to so-called camps in Croatia at which Leto will appear and his band will play, with fans paying thousands to travel and stay on what has been dubbed ‘Mars Island’.
Photos then emerged of Leto wandering around the festival in white robes, Christ-like, while lots of similarly dressed people ran after him, gazing up adoringly, which is concerning to say the least. It hasn’t been held since 2020, though, so maybe they realised it probably didn’t look great.
He has also only this year been the subject of allegations from women, and only last week, the Peacemaker director James Gunn showed his feelings by having lines of dialogue in the new season that took potshots at Leto’s band.
Gunn is now the head of DC Studios, and Leto was famously cast as the Joker in Suicide Squad, the 2016 supervillain movie that co-starred Will Smith and Margot Robbie. Given Gunn’s previous comments online about Leto’s conduct, it’s fair to say he won’t be returning as the character anytime soon.
Aside from being the frontman in that rock group which has had pretty impressive success in their almost 30-year history, Leto has consistently worked on major movies and TV shows, including recent turns in the likes of Blade Runner 2049 and House of Gucci.
He’s known as something of a method actor, where, apparently, on Suicide Squad, he stayed in character the whole time and amused himself by doing things like sending rats and condoms to other cast members, which sounds astonishingly irritating, let’s be honest.
Next he’s about to be seen as Ares in the latest instalment of Disney’s Tron franchise named Tron: Ares. Jeff Bridges will be back for the film, which serves as a sequel to 2010’s Tron Legacy and features a soundtrack from Nine Inch Nails. Lion director Garth Davis is at the helm for the movie, which is scheduled to hit cinemas on October 10th this year.
