Jared Leto is fond of rock-climbing metaphors, so maybe it’s not too on-the-nose to note that the course of his showbiz career has been as jagged as the kind of terrain he’s fond of traversing. A decade ago, he was heading toward his mid-thirties as a respected but hardly box-office-smashing actor on an uncertain trajectory, with a fledgling, eyeliner-enhanced music career that most non-teens considered a vanity project at best. “There were so many people that didn’t understand,” Leto says. “There were people in this town who thought it was insane. There were films that I decided not to do because I had tiny little tours, and people would just lose their minds. And some of them turned into the biggest movies ever made.”
Now, thanks to his band’s steady, hard-won progress; a 2014 Oscar for his bravura turn as a transgender woman with AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club; and his key role as the murderous Joker in August 5th’s supervillain-centric potential blockbuster Suicide Squad, he is both an actual rock star and an A-list movie star — a double brass ring that no one else in his generation has come close to grabbing. “More than one Academy Award-winning actor has walked into my office,” says Leto’s music manager, Irving Azoff, “and said, ‘I can be a successful rock star, help me!’ He’s the only one that pulled it off.”
Remarkably, Leto’s acting career is only now hitting its stride, after beginning in 1994 — before some of his band’s fans were born — with his indelible My So-Called Life role as literacy-impaired high-school-boiler-room make-out king Jordan Catalano. And his newfound status follows an unheard-of six-year break from acting — between 2006 and 2012 — to focus on his music. “He’s not bound to anything,” says his Dallas Buyers Club co-star Matthew McConaughey. “He’s on his own trip. If he considers what might be the next best move for himself, he sure does disguise it. At the same time, he’s very aware of what he’s doing.”
