[imagesource: Warner Bros.]

When you hear the phrase ‘method acting’ what comes to mind?

For me, it’s Heath Ledger and the role of The Joker in The Dark Knight although I think that’s been overhyped since his passing.

Christian Bale in The Machinist is a close second.

Jared Leto doesn’t feature, but that’s not for lack of effort. In fact, Leto has gained a reputation for going all-in on the method acting front with mixed results.

Morbius, where he plays a vampire, has been panned by critics and it’s led The Daily Beast to take a look back at some of his most extreme method acting stories.

Spoiler alert – this isn’t coming from a place of love, with the blurb reading “few actors sound more insufferable to work with than this guy”.

We can head all the way back to 2000 and begin with a look at Requiem for a Dream. The New York Post is also on the case:

Leto has said he lost a substantial amount of weight for the role, as well as spent time with junkies in downtown New York.

Image: John Baer/Artisan/Kobal/REX

“I did whatever I thought I could do in order to bring more authenticity to the role, more honesty … So I spent time with a group of people in the East Village, many of whom are no longer alive — they lost their battles to addiction.”

He later stated that he abstained from sex for two months for the role and caused great damage to his liver due to unhealthy habits.

Leto stepped things up in 2016 with Suicide Squad, where he played – wait for it – The Joker:

….it was a perfect match for his obsessive character-immersion brand. But his approach to the part didn’t go over well with all of his castmates. “He did some bad things, Jared Leto did. He gave some really horrific gifts,” Viola Davis told Vanity Fair.

“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 to Jared Leto.”

Margot Robbie recalls receiving a live rat as a gift (she played Harley Quinn, his love interest), while Leto claimed he sent other members of the cast used condoms and anal beads.

He later walked back those claims, but the wheels had been set in motion.

For 2017’s Blade Runner 2049, he upped the ante:

To play the blind character [of Niander Wallace], he insisted on wearing milky-hued contacts that really obscured his vision.

“He could not see at all. He was walking with an assistant, very slowly,” director Denis 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. It was so beautiful and powerful — I was moved to tears.”

Powerful stuff, except for the one downer that Leto says he never once actually laid eyes on co-star Harrison Ford, one of his acting heroes.

All of the above is excusable, to a degree, but let’s get nasty with stories from Morbius:

…the director [ Daniel Espinosa] confirmed that Leto first walked on crutches to use the bathroom on set to better embody the role of Michael Morbius, who suffers from chronic pain, and when that took too long, was wheeled to the toilet in a wheelchair…

Image: Sony Pictures

Some overworked, underpaid below-the-line worker (maybe multiple) was given the task of pushing a multi-millionaire feigning a limp to urinate.

Did the assistance end there or was the worker required to help with the actual pee process? We may never know.

What we do know is that the entertainment industry, and especially the Academy Awards, loves a tale of method acting taken to the extreme. Leto won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2014 for his portrayal of a transgender woman living with HIV in Dallas Buyers Club.

Image: Truth Entertainment

Given his comments ahead of the release of House of Gucci, it seems he may finally be in on the joke:

…he plays Paolo Gucci in a fat suit and makeup…

“I did it all. I was snorting lines of arrabbiata sauce by the middle of this movie. I had olive oil for blood. This was a deep dive I did,” Leto said in an interview for i-d. “If you took a biopsy of my skin, it would come back as Parmesan cheese! This is my love letter to Italy.”

Sure beats sending used condoms and anal beads.

Progress.

To finish, here’s a quality quote from Robert Pattinson on the topic:

 “I always say about people who do method acting, you only ever see people do the method when they’re playing assholes.”

Such dedication to the craft.