“I’m not sure it was the wisest choice”: when Jared Leto’s method acting left him wheelchair-bound
Whenever Jared Leto signs on to play a role, there’s a high chance a large amount of the attention will fall on whatever ridiculous lengths he’s gone to this time in order to fully embody his character.
When it works, it really works, as his Academy Award win for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in Dallas Buyers Club can attest. Of course, when it goes wrong, he often ends up becoming a widely-mocked figure of fun, as his Golden Raspberry Award wins for Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci and the awful comic book adaptation Morbius has shown.
Did Leto really need to send an array of bizarre, outlandish, and unsettling gifts to his Suicide Squad co-stars to get into the Joker’s mindset? Probably not, seeing as he’s by far the worst iteration of Batman’s arch-nemesis to have ever appeared in a movie, with Will Smith admitting he never actually met Jared Leto, the person, until the movie’s premiere because he was constantly in character.
Did he need to display such insistence to replicating the physical ailments of vampiric scientist Dr Michael Morbius that he ended up being wheeled to and from the set whenever he needed to use the bathroom because he was taking too long getting there on the character’s crutches? Again, no, he did not.
Was it really necessary to wear contact lenses so thick they rendered him blind, requiring assistance to guide him around the cavernous soundstages housing the sets of Blade Runner 2049? It doesn’t really matter because Leto is going to do it anyway, although his most drastic transformation by far had some highly detrimental side effects.
After being cast as John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, in writer and director Jarrett Schaefer’s Chapter 27, Leto gained 67 pounds in a very short space of time. His bulking was assisted by the stomach-churning concoction of microwaved pints of ice cream, which were then mixed with soy sauce and olive oil.
“I’m not sure it was the wisest choice,” he admitted to the Los Angeles Times. “A friend of mine was recently going to gain weight for a film, and I did my best to talk him out of it. Just because you can lose the weight doesn’t mean the impact it had on you isn’t there anymore.”
That was Leto speaking from experience because the rapid weight gain didn’t only end up giving him a bad case of gout, but the unexpected stress placed upon his usually slender frame rendered him wheelchair-bound. “I couldn’t walk for long distances. I had a wheelchair because it was so painful,” he admitted. “My body was in shock from the amount of weight I gained.”
The star revealed that “it took about a year to get back to a place that felt semi-normal,” but was it at least worth it in the end? Chapter 27 earned less than $200,000 at the box office, was dragged around the back and battered by critics, and earned criticism from Sean Lennon, but the results speak for themselves on that front.
