‘Requiem for a Dream’: How did Jared Leto prepare for his most demanding role?
Jared Leto has played his fair share of memorable characters since his rise to fame in the 1990s. Starring as both Paul Allen in American Psycho and Angel Face in Fight Club, Leto is often drawn toward an intense or violent film with the same unstoppable pull as a flame has for a moth. But it wasn’t until his first leading role in Requiem for A Dream, directed by Darren Aronofsky, that he really brought the intensity of a role into his real life.
In an interview with the BBC, Leto said he found Requiem for a Dream “very enriching‘, and stated in more detail: “It’s the hardest thing I’d done. I lost 25 lbs for the role, and I had an accent that I spoke in 24 hours a day. It wasn’t like I could go home and get rid of it.”
As the feature portrays four characters battling drug addiction, Leto had to lose weight to play the character of Harry Goldfarb. He did this by fasting, which he says eventually made him hallucinate and experience a feeling of “complete serenity”. Leto even says he spent some time on “the streets of New York”, but when asked if he tried drugs for the role, he responded, “I didn’t become a junkie to play one,” saying he thinks “drugs [are] a part of the problem”.
The actor continued: “To me, the issue is humanity, which has an obsession through the times with escapism. We want to get out of ourselves. That’s why we party, we get drunk, we go on roller-coasters, we go on the Internet, we watch TV, we go to movies. This [film] is the antithesis.”
Leto has gone on to gain a reputation as a method actor, making headlines with his bizarre but admittedly dedicated behaviour towards co-stars on the 2016 feature Suicide Squad. Just seven years after losing 25lbs to play Harry Goldfarb, Leto gained 67lbs to play the man who killed John Lennon in the 2007 film Chapter 27.
While other actors, like Brian Cox, have criticised method acting as an approach to a role, it might have been worth it for Leto as Requiem for A Dream went on to win a plethora of awards and is still to this day highly regarded and critically acclaimed. Even Cox, in an interview with Town & Country, admitted that the results of his Succession co-star Jeremy Strong’s method acting approach are “always extraordinary and excellent”.
It might seem like a change up for Leto to have gone from playing drug addicts to comic book villains, but in his BBC interview, he did say: “I enjoy popcorn movies too. I’m not saying I’m never gonna make one”.
With Leto going on to star in the not-so-critically acclaimed Suicide Squad and Morbius, he certainly can’t be accused of lying here. But Requiem for A Dream seems to hold a special place for him, describing it as “a reaction to the conventional Hollywood crap that we get fed” and saying, “It’s important for films like this to be made. I’m happy to be a part of a film that takes a stand, and isn’t afraid to spit in your face”.
