With, from left, Viola Davis, Will Smith, Margot Robbie and Joel Kinnaman at the Suicide Squad premiere
Jared Leto with then girlfriend Cameron Diaz in 2002
With Scarlett Johansson in 2004
With Margot Robbie
The cast of the 2000 film American Psycho
Harrison Ford. ‘I read the script and fell in love with the character. But I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about it — I may have already got in trouble for telling you the name...’ He pauses. ‘I can tell you that the experience of making it was one of the highlights of my film career.’ He rates seeing Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner as one of the seminal moments of his childhood. ‘Throughout my life I’ve always gone back to that film. There was something in it that really touched me and taught me a lot about cinema. There’s a level of craftsmanship and beauty that’s unparalleled.’ You might say the same about Leto’s own methods. To prepare for his role as a junkie in Requiem for a Dream, he spent a couple of weeks with actual junkies (shooting up with water, he insists). For Dallas Buyers Club, he arrived on set dressed as a woman and then got changed into character. To play The Joker, he spent hours watching violent crimes on YouTube and then delighted his cast mates by sending them live rats and used condoms to ‘create an element of surprise, a spontaneity and to really break down any kind of walls that might be there…’ The Atlantic wondered if he had ‘ruined method acting for good’. He smiles. ‘I don’t think I need to do it for every role. I mean if I was in Baywatch II, I don’t think I’d need to do it. That would be so much fun, to be in a movie as fun as that. But everyone’s got to do what works for them. Some people can be eating chicken nuggets with a stripper on their lap and then jump right into it. I’ve always just done what I have to do in order to do a good job — and I feel I do a better job when I give a
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bigger commitment. The shows that stand out with Thirty Seconds to Mars are the ones where I’m willing to cross the line and step into that uncomfortable place of imbalance, where I don’t understand what’s going to happen next. The same is true of climbing.’ Climbing rock faces is now his drug of choice; he appreciates nature more as he matures. ‘The act of climbing itself is really a deep, introspective conversation with yourself about your limitations and your ability. There’s a lot of success and failure involved. And you learn a ton. I’m enamoured with it.’
“The great thing about death is that it allows new life. it’s an inevitable and important part of evolution” He pushes himself pretty hard, too. ‘I almost died recently,’ he says, matter-offactly. ‘I’ve been close a few times in my life. There was a moment in Yosemite where I was hanging off Taft Point, which is about 3,000 feet, overlooking the valley… I remember having a very direct conMatthew versation with myself.’ McConaughey and Leto with About what? ‘About their Oscars the inefficiency of in 2014 losing my mind. About how impor-
Leto with Gucci’s Alessandro Michele
Leto with his mother Constance and brother Shannon at the 2014 Oscars
tant it is for survival, it was to stay as calm as I could.’ He is, on balance, fairly cool with death. ‘The great thing about death is that it allows new life. It’s an inevitable and important part of evolution. You have to say goodbye so that new ideas, new thoughts, new people can evolve.’ He smiles. ‘I studied very old people for a film project once, and they were generally pretty happy to say goodbye.’ He is, however, psyched about the ‘biomedical revolution’ we’re going to witness over the next 10 years. As a tech investor, he would be — Silicon Valley is currently pumping billions of dollars into lifeextension, genetic editing, nootropics, bionic limbs and artificial intelligence. Leto is particularly taken with the Singularity, the quasi-mystical belief among technologists that one day we will all merge consciousness with an omniscient artificial intelligence and upload ourselves into the cloud. ‘It’s inevitable that will happen at some point.’ You think? ‘Of course! You’d have to be a monkey not to realise that. The difference between ourselves and our technology will be hard to decipher and determine. I mean, this is a long time in the future, but we are going to become an interplanetary species. Culture and society will advance. And we will become indistinguishable from the technology that gets us there. If you refuse you are going to be left behind in the Dark Ages. You won’t even be able to talk to people, you’ll be grunting compared to the language that they speak.’ He tries to reassure me. ‘It’s far away but I don’t think it’s science fiction. I think it’s reality. Haven’t you had that thing, where you dream something and it sort of... happens?’ Less often than Jared Leto, I imagine.
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On stage with Thirty Seconds to Mars