The role that began Jared Leto’s overcommitment to the method: “I went off the deep end”
Jared Leto is one of those actors who just seems to turn up in big films.
In American Psycho, he’s the guy who gets hacked to bits by Christian Bale. In Fight Club, he’s a member of Project Mayhem. In Alexander, he’s a general in the Macedonian army. Just when you think you’re safe from the Leto, it turns out he’s hiding just around the corner.
The one thing the Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman is perhaps best known for is being a method actor; a very bad method actor. His exploits on the set of Suicide Squad are now the stuff of infamy. He reportedly sent his co-stars a string of bizarre gifts while in character as the Joker; live rats; anal beads; used condoms. You know, normal things that a normal person would send people in the post.
Another project on which Leto might have gotten a little carried away (sarcasm alert) was Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. To get into character as a heroin addict, the musician-actor did just about everything but take the opioid himself.
“Maybe because of my inexperience, I went off the deep end a little bit, but I wanted to make sure I did everything I could,” he once told Albawaba News. “I basically came to New York and went and lived on the Lower East Side and surrounded myself with people who were in the same circumstances as my character.”
This temporary life choice was of course full of some colourful characters and obvious tragedies, as he mentioned, “Every night was an adventure whether it was someone missing the vein in their arm and their hand fills up with poison or they overdose or you’re hanging out and it’s like, ‘Remember that girl we were hanging out with last night? Well, she’s dead!’ I got robbed one night, but I just tried to become one of the group.”
Leto’s character in the movie, Harry Goldfarb, is a troubled individual using and selling heroin in equal measure. His dream is to open a clothes store with his girlfriend Marion, played heartbreakingly by Jennifer Connelly, but his substance abuse has opened a rift between him and his widowed mother, Sara, played by Ellen Burstyn.
Burstyn also conducted her own research to better understand her character. She visited Brooklyn, the area in which the film is set, and spoke to real women in the same situation as Sara. She crucially didn’t almost get herself killed by sleeping rough, and was nominated for an Oscar for her performance. Leto was not. Says it all, really.
To give some credit to Leto—a shocking thing to say, I know—Aronofsky encouraged his stars to really get inside the minds of their characters. The director instructed both Leto and fellow cast member Marlon Wayans to refrain from sex or sugar during the making of the film. This was so that their ‘cravings’ would appear more real on camera. Leto, being himself, took this to the extreme. He starved himself, losing 28lbs to appear as if his body had been addled by the drug. Once again, it’s important to remember that Burstyn got an Oscar nod for her performance, while her onscreen son couldn’t even land a measly Golden Globe.
As Leto continues to make headlines for all the wrong reasons, discussions about him and method acting as a whole continue to grow more divisive and ugly. Some call it the purest form of the craft, while others see it as little more than a pretentious attempt by actors to make themselves feel important. Now, you decide.
