Why Jared Leto demanded to be called “the biggest rock star on the planet”
We’ve just gone past that time of year again, when music’s most famous faces come together under one roof to celebrate the Brit Awards. The final stop of the musical award show season, where pats on the back are given to artists who, quite frankly, don’t even need them, as they seem to be the only ones coping just fine in this brutally unfair industry landscape.
But one of the few categories of the night that should always serve as something of a tonic to the baselessness of glittering commercialism is the rock and alternative awards. Inherently, those categories have been integral to countercultural worlds, inhabited by DIY artists who bravely represent the struggle of the modern-day artist.
But with every year, it has felt as though those categories have felt further and further removed from the actual reality of their genre. A myriad of brilliant and impactful artists are overlooked for legacy stars or industry-moulded bands who serve as a manufactured representation of what a great rock or alternative artist should look like.
In 2024, The Rolling Stones somehow elbowed out a catalogue of emerging rock stars, while in 2022, Tom Grennan and Coldplay were plucked out of the pop world to instead take the place of any given rock band who could have rightfully been recognised.
So, with the Brit Awards becoming an environment that is somewhat devoid of the reality we, the everyday music fans, live in, it’s not entirely surprising to hear stories of artists getting high on the show’s supply of delusion. In fact, it’s even less surprising to hear tales of Jared Leto basking in the self-made illusion of grandeur, for he has rarely needed to wait until the Brit Awards to do so.
During one evening, when host Jack Whitehall was preparing to introduce Leto on stage to a room of A-list pop stars, who were all certainly more musically active than Leto himself, the Thirty Seconds To Mars singer brazenly requested he be introduced to the room as the biggest rock star on the planet.
“He didn’t like his intro,” Whitehall recalled, “And then during the show, while I was up on stage hosting it, one of the producers found him by the autocue with his publicist changing my script, actually deleting the intro and typing in his own one.”
He continued, “He wanted me to introduce him as the biggest rock star on the planet, and I wasn’t on board with that – I wanted to introduce him as ‘The Hipster Jesus’, and that was deleted,” he laughed, before saying: “Now the autocue is guarded as well. I’ll have my mum there dressed as Chappell Roan!”
Luckily, Whitehall didn’t oblige, but it wouldn’t have surprised any of the audience in the room, nor those watching from home, as the Brit Awards have slowly become an event entirely disconnected from the reality of the music industry. Because the truth is, music is shifting into a relatively dark and unsustainable place, where the biggest rock star no longer exists. Nevertheless, it certainly isn’t Jared Leto.
