Checking in with JARED LETO
Many actors will tell you that doing accents isn’t so much a matter of imitation as it is of capturing a character’s particular voice.
That certainly held true for Jared Leto, who as WeWork founder Adam Neumann in the Apple TV+ drama “WeCrashed” took on the challenge of recreating the Israeli immigrant’s unusual speech patterns. But the 50-year-old actor admits he had plenty of video material and human help to fall back on.
“I had a great team of Israelis surrounding me that I was working with ... and so that the voice and that accent was around me all the time ...,” he explains. “But with Adam’s accent, I wasn’t really doing an Israeli accent, I was doing Adam’s accent.”
“An accent is just a series of mistakes,” he continues. “It’s you learn how to say a word and maybe you don’t say it correctly, whatever that means, but it’s a series of habits. It’s the way your mouth makes shapes, and everyone learns them differently. There’s some similarities culturally or from country-to-country or region-to-region, but the good thing about Adam is there was a lot of material out there.”
As Leto’s roles go, his transformation into Neumann was probably one of his least extreme. The chameleonlike actor gained 62 pounds to play John Lennon killer Mark David Chapman in the 2007 feature “Chapter 27,” lost 35 pounds to play Rayon to Oscar-winning effect in 2013’s “Dallas Buyers Club” and practiced months of self-deprivation to take on the physicality of heroin addict Harry in 2000’s “Requiem for a Dream.”
Leto is as Method as it gets and the hard work he put in to perfect Adam’s accent in “WeCrashed” paid off with a big thumbs up from series executive producer Lee Eisenberg’s Israeli father.
“I passed the dad test, I’m happy,” Leto says. “If they let me in to break pita bread or two, then I’ll know that I’m really good.”
Birth name: Jared Joseph Bryant (Leto is his stepfather’s surname)
Birth date: Dec. 26, 1971
Birthplace: Bossier City, La.
Alma mater: School of Visual Arts New York City
Marital status: Single
TV credits include: “Camp Wilder,” “Almost Home,” “Rebel Highway,” “My So-Called Life” Movie credits include: “How to Make an American Quilt” (1995), “Prefontaine” (1997), “The Thin Red Line” (1998), “Fight Club” (1999), “Girl, Interrupted” (1999), “American Psycho” (2000), “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), “Panic Room” (2002), “Lonely Hearts” (2006), “Chapter 27” (2007), “Dallas Buyers Club” (2013), “Suicide Squad” (2016), “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” (2021), “House of Gucci” (2021), “Morbius” (forthcoming)