During his three decades in the business, Jared Leto has cultivated and carefully curated a reputation as one of his generation’s most idiosyncratic talents. Method is the least you can expect whenever the actor signs on for a new project, and he’s gone to some pretty extreme lengths to get into character.
He’s rendered himself legally blind by wearing heavy-duty contact lenses on Blade Runner 2049, buried himself under mountains of prosthetics for Ridley Scott’s recent House of Gucci, packed on so much weight for Chapter 27 that he gave himself gout and ended up in a wheelchair, spent the entire Suicide Squad shoot behaving like the Joker, and so it goes.
On a personal level, he missed the start of the pandemic because he was at an isolated meditation retreat in the desert, and misplaced his Academy Award when he moved house, so he’s an all-round unique dude. Incredibly, Leto turns 50 years old today, but some folks are simply refusing to believe it.
Maybe the reason he’s using his real accent for a change in Morbius has to do with the fact he doesn’t need to dive deep into playing someone burdened with the gift of immortality, because goddamn this guy looks good for hitting a half-century.