‘Predatory, terrifying and unacceptable': The problem with Jared Leto

Telegraph

10-06-2025

Disney, we have a problem. Five months out from the release of Tron: Ares, the studio's $200 million sequel to the beloved Eighties sci-fi movie, one of the project's stars, Jared Leto, has been engulfed in a #MeToo scandal. An Oscar-winning actor and frontman of the band 30 Seconds To Mars, Leto, has been accused by nine women of inappropriate behaviour – including claims his conduct was 'predatory, terrifying and unacceptable'.
Leto has 'expressly denied' the accusations reported by Air Mail. They include an assertion by one woman that Leto approached her in 2006 when she was 16 and he was 35. She says Leto, who was seated in an LA cafe with then-19-year-old actor Ashley Olsen, grabbed the woman by the arm. 'I looked down, and it was Jared Leto,' she said, adding: 'We had a quick conversation, and he got my number.'
'The conversations turned sexual'
She continued that Leto called her home a few days later. 'I don't know if he was on drugs or what … It was the weirdest, grossest voice … [But] for me, it's Jared, you know?..the conversations turned sexual. He'd ask things like: 'Have you ever had a boyfriend? Have you ever sucked a d---?'' (Leto 'has not had a drink or used drugs in over 35 years,' the actor's representative told Air Mail.)
These and other accusations make for grisly reading – another woman recalls how, once, when she was 18, Leto 'suddenly pulled his penis out and started masturbating'.
With Leto insisting on his innocence, it remains to be seen how the controversy will play out. Still, Disney executives will surely thinking towards damage limitation ahead of Tron: Ares.
The film's plot has been kept largely under wraps, but given that Leto is to play the eponymous artificial intelligence 'Ares', removing him from the film would be no easy task. Following the failure of a previous Tron spin-off – 2010's Tron: Legacy – the studio may wish it could just hit AI Overview Ctrl+Alt+Delete on the entire franchise.
The stakes are high for Disney as it tries to move beyond a succession of flops, including the disastrous Snow White live-action reboot which is estimated to have left the Magic Kingdom $115 million in the red. Factoring in associated marketing costs, it is believed Tron: Ares would need to generate $400 million just to break even. But who would want to see the third movie in a fading series whose title character is played by potential persona non grata, Jared Leto?
Even before these latest accusations, there were question marks around the now 53-year-old actor. In 2018, Disney actor Dylan Spouse tagged Jared Leto in a tweet and said, 'Yo @JaredLeto now that you've slid into the dm's of every female model aged 18 - 25, what would you say your success rate is.' In a deleted post, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn added, 'he starts at 18 on the internet?'
Leto appears not to have taken the Gunn's shade to heart. Twelve months later, in 2019, he was photographed in Croatia, modelling white robes and a Jesus-like beard, surrounded by fans of 30 Seconds To Mars (where his brother Shannon plays drums). They had accompanied him to Central Europe for the latest in a series of 'summer camps', where activities include yoga, cooking classes and – well, there's always a downside – a 30 Seconds To Mars performance. Dressing up was part of the fun at these events – and Leto was the trend-setter with his Christ-like outfit (The camps were discontinued after the pandemic). Just so nobody missed what he was going for, the band's social media wrote: 'Yes, this is a cult #MarsIsland.'
Self-styled cult leader
Leto may have styled himself as the head of a cult, but his childhood reads closer to a Southern Gothic novel. He was born in impoverished Bossier City, Louisiana, where the major local industry was a trio of riverside casinos. His father, Tony Bryant, abandoned the family when he was an infant. Leto recalled his father's last words as, 'I'll see you, kid, just going to the store to get a carton of milk'.
Bryant would die by suicide when Leto was eight. His mother Constance had by then moved back in with her parents. She later married Carl Leto, Jared's adoptive father. However, there was little stability in Leto's life. By 16, he was taking drugs and paying for his habit with theft.
'There was a moment involving a gun and some cocaine, that may have been a turning point for me. I knew it wasn't good,' he would say. He turned himself around, though and, aged 22, had his big break as Jordan Catalano in the teen drama My So Called Life.
'He went full Joker'
It's probably as well Leto and his 30 Seconds To Mars 'Echelon' – as fans call themselves – have a strong bond. Cinema has proven to be a less supportive environment. In 2014, he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing a transgender character in Dallas Buyer's Club. However, his campaign to carve out a space in blockbusters came unstuck with his disastrous turn in David Ayer's Suicide Squad in 2016.
The problem wasn't Leto on screen – he was perfectly fine as a sleazy Joker (he returned to the character in a new scene filmed for Zack Snyder's four-hour Justice League). The issue was his behaviour off-camera and rumours he had gone too far trying to freak out other cast members.
'He did some bad things, Jared Leto did. He gave some really horrific gifts,' said Suicide Squad star Viola Davis. 'He had a henchman who would come into the rehearsal room, and the henchman came in with a dead pig and plopped it on the table, and then he walked out. And that was our introduction into Jared Leto.'
Along with the pigs, Leto was said to have sent used condoms, dead rats and pornographic magazines. Even Will Smith – an actor whom we can now safely say is no stranger to controversy – was weirded out.
'First we found out that Jared wasn't going to be in rehearsals,' said Smith, who played Deadshot. 'And we were like, 'That's messed up! How is he not going to be in rehearsals?' And then there was a bag on the door, and this dude barges in and throws a dead pig on the floor in front of us. We're like, 'OK. Jared has officially set off the Suicide Squad. He went full Joker'.'
Going 'full Joker' was nothing new. Throughout his career, he has taken method acting to extremes. In preparation for 2022's superhero film Morbius, Leto met 'doctors and patients who could teach him about living with a rare, incurable blood disease'. To walk with a cane – as Morbius does in the film – he 'studied with real cane users'. 'I remember fearing for this guy's spine,' said co-star Adria Arjona.
'It was like seeing Jesus walking into a temple'
He'd taken things ever further, appearing opposite Lady Gaga in Ridley Scott's House Of Gucci. 'I did it all,' Leto told i-D magazine. 'I was snorting lines of arrabbiata sauce'. In Blade Runner 2049, in which he played a villainous and blind tech evangelist, he wore special contact lenses that dramatically reduced his vision.
'He was walking with an assistant, very slowly,' director Dennis Villeneuve told the Wall Street Journal. 'It was like seeing Jesus walking into a temple. Everybody became super silent, and there was a kind of sacred moment. Everyone was in awe.'
Most drastic of all was Dallas Buyer's Club, for which he shed weight by eating nothing but cucumbers. 'I stayed in character the entire shoot. I couldn't imagine doing it another way. I'd gone too far to pick it up and drop it off,' he informed the Guardian. 'I lost around 40lb [almost three stone/18kg] and then I stopped counting. For me, it was about how it made me feel, how it made other people treat me. I got down to something like 114lb [about eight stone], and that was enough to do what I wanted it to do, which was to change everything about me.'
He was widely acclaimed for Dallas Buyers Club. Suicide Squad, however, was a mess, and Leto's scenes were cut significantly. He would later deny the grisliest of the rumours and was reportedly outraged when Warner Bros announced it was pivoting to a Joker origin story starring Joaquin Phoenix, directed by Todd Phillips (for which Phoenix would win an Oscar).
'Leto's frustration that Warner Bros was moving ahead with the Phillips project was so great early on that he tried to throttle the rival Joker in its cradle,' according to a 2019 article in the Hollywood Reporter.
'According to sources familiar with Leto's behaviour, when the Oscar-winning actor learnt of the Phillips project, he not only complained bitterly to his agents at CAA, who also represent Phillips, but asked his music manager, Irving Azoff, to call the leader of Warners's parent company.'
Uncertain future
And then came his Citizen Kane of terrible films, the Venom spin-off Morbius, in which Leto played a moody vampire – a role described by the Telegraph at the time as a 'cross between Russell Brand and a Barbary macaque'. He went on to star opposite Anne Hathaway in We Crashed, Apple TV +'s underwhelming chronicling of the rise and fall of the We Work startup (ironically – or perhaps appropriately – Leto has reportedly made a $90 million fortune from early investments in tech companies such as Airbnb and Uber).
He has since gone back on the road with 30 Seconds To Mars , albeit with diminishing returns. London's O2 was half empty when the band played there last year – though an ongoing tour of Europe this summer is sold out. But it was on the big screen that his attentions were focused with Tron: Ares to have been followed by a big screen reboot of Masters of the Universe, with Leto playing sarcastic mega-villain Skeletor. As with so much else in Leto's career, the commercial prospects of these projects is now uncertain.
In the case of Tron: Ares it is too late for Disney to flip the ejector switch. The project is essentially done and dusted and Disney has already put out a series of trailers – top heavy with Tron's familiar wiz-bang 'light cycles', along with footage of Leto's co-stars Gillian Anderson, Greta Lee and Jeff Bridges (returning from the original). 'Ready?' says Bridges in the latest promo. 'There's no going back'. Disney may regret come to regret that line.