RENAISSANCE MAN
As arresting in person as he is on screen, actor Jared Leto talks about taking on the role of the Joker, and his creative kinship with Gucci’s Alessandro Michele. By Sophie Tedmanson.
Actor Jared Leto talks about taking on the role of the Joker, and his creative kinship with Gucci’s Alessandro Michele.
“YOU JUST DIG IN AND WORK REALLY HARD … YOU IMAGINE, YOU DREAM A BIT”
Jared Leto is standing, statesman-like, with one hand on his hip and one hand resting on the top of a highbacked armchair. Were it not for the knitted hat and animal-motif sweater, straight from the Gucci wardrobe, you would think he was posing for a Renaissance painting. But then, in a way, he is. Leto – actor, musician, lady-killer, vagabond – is known as something of a modern-day Renaissance man. Which is fitting, given his current status as a muse to fashion’s gifted and compelling Gucci creative director, Alessandro Michele, who appointed Leto the face of the fragrance Gucci Guilty last December.
The pair are kindred spirits, sharing a passion for the creative process, ethereal looks and a spirited take on the world – plus they both rock an embroidered jacket and floral collar.
“I think that we relate for sure … we’re both creative people,” Leto says of Michele, who was his date to the Oscars in February, and who in turn took Leto to the Met Ball in March. The pair also spent time together at the Gucci men’s show in Milan in June, where Leto, dressed in an embroidered bomber jacket, sat front row next to Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri.
“[Michele] is also really into the work and not so much the trappings of that business, and that’s a nice reminder that you can be in love with your process, your art, your life, and still be a good person.
“I think he’s redefined the brand; he’s reminded us how much joy there can be through his work. His clothes are a celebration of life, full of colour, full of nature, flowers and animals. There’s a kind of spirit and emotion to his work and people are obviously responding to it.”
There is a spirit and emotion to Leto, too. In person his eyes are as vivid as the Californian sky outside the window, and he has a personality that flips from intense artist to cheeky to hippy dreamer to seductive, in one sentence. We are talking at the Oscar-winner’s studio in the Hollywood Hills. He motions for me to sit, then continues to stand as we talk, and for a while I think it’s a weird roleplay he assumes during interviews. “By the way, I’m only standing up because my hip is really sore when I sit down,” he concedes with a wince of pain.
Leto is known for pushing the boundaries, taking risks with his roles. His breakthrough came in 1997, playing Olympic running hopeful Steve Prefontaine, followed by a wild-eyed turn in Fight Club, then a heroin addict in Requiem for a Dream. He won an Oscar in 2014 for his extraordinary depiction of a transgender woman with HIV in the Dallas Buyers Club, and this month he will leap onto our screens playing the Joker in the much-hyped DC Comics antihero outing Suicide Squad, alongside Australians Margot Robbie, as Harley Quinn, and Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang. Revising a role previously played so iconically by Jack Nicholson and the late great Heath Ledger in the Batman films was “an honour”, Leto says.
“It was exciting to think about being handed the baton. I had a big responsibility,” he says. “I got to play one of the most legendary roles in the history of cinema, so I was thrilled.”
Leto is known for inhabiting his roles in mind and body using method acting. “You just dig in and work really hard, you start asking questions, you imagine, you dream a bit,” he says of getting into the mind-set of his characters. “It’s like making a sculpture or a painting or building something, you know, piece by piece you become journalist, you become detective … you become a kind of an author I guess, a writer in a sense of the character.” In the role of Joker, he would play tricks on his castmates, once leaving a rat in Margot Robbie’s trailer, all “part of the game” of inhabiting the mind of a psychopathic prankster.
“I thought it was something the Joker would do,” he says. “It was just a way to be focused and stay concentrated and to shut the world out. There’s a lot to love about the Joker: he’s not that bad a guy,” he pauses, then his grin turns a little strange and suddenly his eyes widen into a manic stare: “Just cos he’ll rip your face off and tear your brain out.”
I laugh, a little nervously, surprised at this momentary albeit brilliant character appearance. Then Leto’s face softens and the Joker has left the conversation. Phew.
“I think that he’s a shaman, I think he’s in touch with the universe. He’s got a power that is very, very seductive.”
He should know. Leto’s handsome looks and added rock-star status, care of his band Thirty Seconds to Mars, have made him a seductive figure to a legion of female fans.
He says he finds it hard to multi-task, so the band tends to have a hiatus when he is making a movie, and vice versa. When I ask what he does in his down time, he mentions going out to one of his favourite places: the Joshua Tree National Park. It seems fitting and I picture him sitting alone and cross-legged at sunrise.
“These days I like to spend time in nature, to be away from everything. I rockclimb, or hike, or do meditation,” he says, then without missing a beat, “or orgies.”
The Gucci Guilty campaign, which was directed by Michele, features Leto in a post- ménage à trois of sorts, frolicking in a sumptuous hotel room then wandering the streets as day breaks over Venice. It is a sexually charged yet a romantically beautiful vision as the trio flitter around the canals with their laissez-faire attitude, dressed androgynously in Gucci. It fits with the gender-bending, rule-breaking, unisex nature of the fragrance – the idea that women can wear men’s cologne and men can wear women’s, that everything can be shared. I ask Leto if he ascribes to this philosophy.
“Of course. Who says women need to wear a flowery scent or a fruity smell or it’s either/or? At the end of the day people should wear what they respond to emotionally or what makes them feel good.”
It is a free-thinking, softly anarchic aesthetic he infuses into his own life. “I like to take chances and turn things in their head,” Leto says. “Life would be a bit dull if we weren’t to do that, right?”