The “horrific” gifts Jared Leto sent to his co-stars on ‘Suicide Squad’
Before Jeremy Strong was method acting his way into the long-suffering shoes of Kendall Roy, Jared Leto was routinely scaring his co-stars with his fully immersive take on the Joker for 2016’s Suicide Squad. While universally panned, the film has enjoyed a recent resurgence in popularity, with fans pushing to see David Ayer’s initial gritty cut. But back in 2016, it was Leto’s bizarre gifts to his co-stars that got fans talking.
Readying himself to play the Clown Prince of Gotham City, Leto’s initial move was to send the cast a dead pig at their first table read. That ode to the Joker’s instability quickly morphed into refusing to be called by his real name on set, with “Mister J” being the only moniker he’d respond to.
His unfaltering commitment to the character prompted Will Smith to say he “never actually met Jared Leto” because he was so caught up embodying the Joker.
“We worked together for six months, and we’ve never exchanged a word outside of ‘action!’ and ‘cut!'” Smith told Apple Music. “We’ve never said ‘hello,’ we’ve never said ‘good day.’ I’ve only ever spoken to him as Deadshot and him as the Joker. I literally have not met him yet – not a single word exchanged off-camera. He was all in on the Joker.”
Their onscreen counterpart Margot Robbie was also on the receiving end of Leto’s immersive techniques and was sent a live rat while she played his manic love interest, Harley Quinn.
“At first I thought this was disgusting,” she said during an appearance on Jimmy Fallon. “But then after that, I was like, ‘I’m not going to kill him,’ so I ended up keeping him as a pet. I ended up getting him like a sweet little playpen, a slide, a hammock, and a leash because I wanted to take him to set and walk him around. But then our landlord at the place I was staying found out.”
While co-star Viola Davis described the arrival of his sporadic gifts as “horrific”, director Ayer was impressed with his incessant attempts to shock on set. “The Joker is something you have to be, and you can see how exhausting and painful it is for him to be this character,” said Ayer. “But you can feel it when he comes to work, the crew feels it, everyone feels it. It’s like the birds stop flying. He’s fucking terrifying.”
Other strange gifts included dildos, switchblades, used condoms and X-rated magazines. But there was always a method to the madness. “I did a lot of things to create a dynamic, to create an element of surprise, of spontaneity, and to really break down any kind of walls that may be there,” Leto said. “The Joker is somebody who doesn’t really respect things like personal space or boundaries.”
