Details Magazine March 1997
Live fast, die young. After nineteen episodes, ABC pulled the plug on My So-Called Life, but Jared Leto emerged a TV star. Now he graduates to the big screen in the true story of ’70s track legend Steve Prefontaine’s short but brilliant life.
Jared Leto died suddenly last year. The reports of his demise, which eventually surfaced on the Internet, were greatly exaggerated: Most said it was a drug overdose, others said it was a car wreck, a few said it was AIDS. He was filming a movie in Ireland, where his role on the short-lived TV series My So-Called Life had made him popular, when the news arrived. “Kids would come up to me all day long saying, ‘Oh my God, we had a funeral for you, we heard you were dead.’” Such is the price of teen-idol fame. And don’t forget the extra service charge: “You know you’re really famous when there’s rumors about you being gay.” Very much alive and so not-gay, Leto takes it all in stride. It’s the third bit of gossip that really puzzles him: “All those reports that I sleep in my closet. I don’t know how people get that. People are so obsessed with what you do at home.”
This is Jared Leto’s so-called life story. Five years ago, he was studying filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. He took a course called Acting for Directors and found his calling. Then, as legend would have it, he moved to Los Angeles, and without so much as a resume or a head shot found himself an agent within a week. (“I had a big mouth,” he explains. “Once I got in a room with people, I was even more vocal about my determination.”) He did guest spots on forgotten sitcoms like The Torkelsons and Camp Wilder. Then he auditioned for a show produced by the creators of thirtysomething. It was called My So-Called Life, a brilliantly written teen-something view of the mallternative nation. Jared won the role of high-school anti-hero Jordan Catalano, that obscure object of desire for Claire Danes’ character, Angela Chase. In one episode, Jordan is described thusly: “Fairly out of it, not unintelligent…sort of a stray puppy. He may even be a halfway decent person, but let me tell you…trouble…He’s way too gorgeous.”
Cool, mysterious, and deliberately underplayed, Jordan Catalano had that effect on most of the women in the show, but he spent much of his time leaning against high-school lockers, his eyes closed, or leaning into Claire Danes, their lips locked. Occasionally he uttered a “Huh?” or “Whatever,” as if awakening for a really excellent daydream.
Though the show lasted only nineteen episodes on ABC (it is now being rerun on MTV), Jordan Catalano lives on as an icon of male adolescence, and it is a measure of Jared Leto’s aspirations that he now considers his work on the show to be nothing more than an apprenticeship. Winnie Holzman, who created My So-Called Life, explains it to me: “In a way, he’s perverse - he’s somebody who wants to defeat the expectations you have about him, and I think he takes pleasure in that. He wants to be taken seriously; he does not want to cheapen himself.”
For any young actor looking to launch a career on the big screen, Jordan Catalano was the perfect role - too small to be scrutinized, too charismatic to be ignored. But for nearly two years after the series ended in 1994, Jared didn’t work much. He read scripts and turned down movies that were intended to capitalize on his good looks and his raging-hormones fans. He was intrigued enough by the concept behind Showtime’s Rebel Highway, a series of B-movie remakes, to star in an episode entitled The Cool and the Crazy with Alicia Silverstone, but the results were more lame than lurid. (It is a credit that has been summarily deleted from Leto’s official bio.) Later that year, he joined an enormous ensemble in 1995’s How to Make an American Quilt with Winona Ryder and Claire Danes for a role that he describes as “about three minutes long, but look at the cast. To put my toe in the pool of quality was fun.”
This year, he will appear alongside Dennis Quaid and Danny Glover in the Paramount Pictures feature Going West in America as a suspected serial killer, and play Frankie Griffin, a seventeen-year-old in the 1970s, in the Irish indie The Last of the High Kings. (Though it received warm reviews in Ireland, the film has not yet been scheduled for a U.S. release.)
But the true test of Jared Leto’s talent and range comes this month when he stars in Prefontaine, which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Prefontaine is the real-life story of the cocky, charismatic long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine, who smashed all the existing American records in the three-mile event in the ’70s and helped turn track into a high-profile sport. At twenty-one, he lived through the kidnapping and killings of Israeli hostages in the 1972 Munich Olympics just days before his big race. After a strong start, he fell behind in the last two hundred yards and finished fourth. He returned to the U.S., turning down $250,000 to join a pro track league. Instead, he remained an amateur, and later, after run-ins with the Amateur Athletics Union, bacame an advocate for athletes’ rights until he died, tragically, in a car crash in 1975. The story is so compelling, such a star-making vehicle, that Tom Cruise is producing another version of it with Billy Crudup in the title role, to be released later this year.
Leto’s version, budgeted at $8 million, is directed by Steve James, fresh from his success with the award-winning documentary Hoop Dreams. It is a gamble for them both: James’s first major-studio feature, and Leto’s first starring role. Jared’s resemblance to Prefontaine was striking enough, and after his reading he had everyone convinced he could play the part. He immersed himself in his character’s life, meeting Prefontaine’s family and training for six weeks with one of Pre’s college roommates. He adopted Pre’s voice and unique, upright, running style. He wore a walrus mustache and muttonchop sideburns, a pink polyester blazer and bell-bottoms. (“It’s funny. As soon as you put on those pants, your body just goes a different way.”) The transformation was so complete that when Steve’s sister, Linda Prefontaine, first saw Jared in charater, she broke down and cried.
On the set, James remembers, Jared could be “extremely private, to the point of being noncommunicative - he really gets wrapped up in what he’s playing.” Whatever his method, James says, Leto nailed Prefontaine. “You witness this guy go from being immature and a bit of an asshole to a leader of men without it being hokey. And I know I’m prejudiced, but I think Jared does a great job of showing this guy change.”
I meet Jared Leto at the spanish-style house he rents in Hollywood. We are going on a hike. (His other suggestions: going to a shooting range or bungee jumping.) He steps out of the house in an Adidas shirt and Nike track pants. With his shaggy hair and beard he looks like a latter-day teenage Jesus. Judas, the half-wolf/half-husky he adopted a year ago, betrays him with a kiss.
Right on my lips. “He licked you?” Jared asks me. “You better not make me jealous.”
In person, there are two things about Jared Leto that you notice immediately. First, his smile. It is the smile of a little boy who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar but is confident he’ll get to eat the Oreo nonetheless. When he is asked to do it on-camera, he calls that smile “corny.” Then, his stare, unblinking, a little unsettling. (“Those eyes have a magnetic effect on women,” says Claire Danes.) It is also the stare that you use to assert yourself against vice principals and other assholes, and the stare you use when you are daydreaming and don’t want anyone to know it.
We barrel along in Jared’s GM Yukon, Marilyn Manson blasting on the CD player. When we reach the hills of Pacific Palisades, Judas leads the way along the winding dirt trails. Still in condition from the running he did in Prefontaine, Jared bounds after his dog. I trudge steadily behind. After a mile or so, we settle on a large boulder. As Jared scratches glyphs into the rock, we talk. I ask about his past, which is cloudy in detail; he stonewalls me, as if it has no relevance.
He is not the type of actor who reels off wistful memories, witty anecdotes, or poignant life lessons. It’s as though he has arrived here, at the threshold of celebrity, without any baggage at all. And I am not the type to let him check in without asking where it is. But first I royally screw up, by pronouncing his name “lee-dough.” “It’s ‘let-o,’” he corrects me nicely. He tells me it’s a name his mother married into, not a stage name, as some people have speculated. “I don’t know why I would ever think of Jared Leto.”
If you really want to get under his skin, ask Jared Leto about the quote that has found its way onto the Internet: “I fall in love with every beautiful girl I meet.” “That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” he splutters. “I’m about the most opposite of that statement you could ever imagine. Where do you get this shit?”
I reach in my pocket and pull out a printout of the First Unofficial Jared Leto Homepage. We read through it. They’ve got some things right: He likes veggies and popcorn and he has a Burton Air snowboard; he worked as a dishwasher at twelve (“at the Three Pigs Barbecue in Virginia”); he hates shaving, likes Nirvana (along with Juliana Hatfield, Bikini Kill, and the Young Pioneers). They are often off on his height and the fact that dropping out of school in tenth grade was his biggest regret. (“No. Never. I think public school is the Dark Ages. And they neglect to say I went back.”) He shrugs. He’s been impersonated online before. “I don’t even have an e-mail address. The scary thing about the Internet is that people believe whatever they read. Especially on a computer because it makes it seem more factual.” Like the “fact” that he does not like Spam. “Yeah, now I’m gonna get people calling me up, ‘What’s wrong with Spam, motherfucker?’”
If I really want to get inside his head, Jared Leto suggests, I should start on the outside. “I was abducted once when I was younger, actually my whole family was,” he explains with utmost sincerity. “And I have these little pattern scars on my head, but you’d have to shave my hair off to see them. You’d get to know a lot about me if you knew how to read the encrypted patterns.” For a moment, I am taken in. Then he breaks an I’ve-got-ya grin. “But you’d definitely have to have been taken away to the mother ship and taught to read the language.”
In a strange and simple way, he is an alien. But I am learning a bit of his language - his sly smile, the way he touches my arm to emphasize a point, the way he compliments me on a question rather than answering it. In conversation, Leto is witty and sharp, though he knows sarcasm doesn’t translate into print. He hasn’t done many interviews, and what he lacks in enthusiasm he makes up for with evasion; ask him too many personal questions and his force field goes up.
“I have no desire to show the world my dirty underwear.”
Maybe he is just covering his assets, protecting his feelings - the currency of any actor - from the cannibalism of a tabloid-driven society. Maybe he has learned the lessons of the overindulgent Brat Pack and the self-indulgent skank idols who sneak guns on airplanes, shoot drugs, or smash hotel rooms. Maybe he doesn’t want to burn out in a fireball of hype. Maybe he has seen fame in the late ’90s for what it is: invasive and unforgiving. So he engages in the process with caution and care. He has negotiated the terms of his compromise. I will tell you enough to keep you intrigued, but you shall never truly know me.
One thing he will share, an observation about the whole business of success: “That being content with yourself has so little to do with materialistic accomplishments. So many people have tried to get happiness and serenity from outside things; it’s pretty much common knowledge that that is a road to nowhere. I’ve never heard anybody say, ‘Fame made me the complete person I am.’ Well, I’m sure people have said it, but nobody I respect.”
After our hike, we go to the Reel Inn in Malibu. Jared’s treat. I have shrimp cocktail; he has crab cakes. He orders a root beer, and the waitress inexplicably asks for his ID. Perhaps she recognizes him. Inexplicably, he hands over his license. Perhaps he’s flirting.
“What do you do?” she asks.
“I’m a long-distance runner,” he replies. “My name is Steve.”
“It says Jared on your license.”
“Steve is my middle name,” he explains.
“People think he’s an actor,” I explain.
“You don’t look like an actor,” she says. “The manager thinks you’re a surfer.”
We eat outside and talk about things that matter to him: “I’m really attracted to organic processes. I can barely say that with a straight face, but it’s true. Acting, music, painting, anything. Not to sound too artsy-smartsy, but it’s all expression.” He tells me he is reading a history of Method acting, how it came to fruition in America, its connection to McCarthyism, and how whether you’re a soap star or a Broadway legend, it’s basically the American style of acting. He thinks we are all actors. “Even babies. You want milk, you cry.”
He tells me he’d like to do a film version of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, the true story of a young man who took off on an odyssey in Alaska, survived off the wilderness for almost four months, and then perished. Another guy his age who died young. Jared always believed he himself would die young, but he says he’s never fantasized about his own funeral. “Well,” he admits, “I’m sure I’ve thought about it at some point. I’m sure I’ve had a nice pity party on the toilet.”
ME: Well, can you cry on cue?
JARED: I can feel pain on cue. I can get inside myself and sometimes there are tears. I go for a long, long time without crying. The more you do it, it’s easier to do.
ME: Do you ever look in the mirror when you cry?
JARED: If I’m ever at a really dramatic, emotional moment in my life, there’s a little part of me that goes, “Remember this, always.”
I ask him if he can be happy on cue and he tells me this story about finding a wallet he’s had for a very long time. “Me and my brother stole it when I was in fifth grade. There were some Harley-Davidson bikers, big scary guys playing football on this hill, and one of the guys laid down a black leather chain wallet. Me and my brother saw it, gave each other the quick sideways look, and snuck over, stole it, and just tore ass.”
ME: You stole a Hell’s Angel’s wallet?
JARED: (blasé) That was nothing.
ME: Nothing? Ever been arrested?
JARED: (as if he didn’t hear me) What did you say?
ME: (louder) Were you ever arrested?
JARED: (staring me down) Was I what?
ME: Ever arrested for anything?
JARED: (quietly befuddled) What are you talking about? (briskly changing the subject) What are you drinking?
ME: I’m drinking truth serum, have some?
JARED: (looking at my drink) You know, if you suck on those old school paper straws too long, you start getting pulp in your mouth.
Another day, another meal, we play a game called “Either/Or.” Tortoise or hare? (pause) Hare. I wish I was more patient. I think most people do. Plan or impulse? Impulse. I’m spontaneous. I pick up and just take a drive for the weekend. If I hear a friend is going somewhere…not that I have any friends. High-school jock or parking-lot slacker? More like a toilet troll. How do you like that one, huh? Basketball or hockey?
The only sport I ever played on a team was hockey. I played right wing. I only played for a while because we moved from the North to the South, and who plays hockey in the South? It costs a million dollars. Democrat or Republican? Neither, I gave it up for Bill. He owes me one. Bill Murray or Rodney Dangerfield? Bill Murray. He’s a funny motherfucker. A smart guy. Jesus or Satan? Definitely Satan. He’s so much cooler. Sting or the Police? I thought it would be like Mudhoney or the Melvins. Then it would have to be both. Madonna or Courtney? Pass. Scorsese or Coppola? When I was a kid my mom would take me to cool films all the time. I grew up with the great films of Scorsese. What are you going to say bout Scorsese? He’s the King. Hemingway or Fitzgerald? Neither. When I want something literary, I go to the magazine store. That’s a joke. I usually have four books going. When I was real young, the books that I reread were the Narnia chronicles by C.S. Lewis. They were fantasy with some undercover kind of religious ideas snuck in there. Pro-life or pro-choice? Ah, you get personal, don’t you? You’re bold. I like that. Pro-choice. (leans back in his chair, gestures to the heavens) Let the bombs come. Let ‘em, I’m ready. Briefs or boxers? You know how many times I have been asked that? At least three. You gotta come up with a better one than that. Okay, thong or jockstrap? (laughs) What if I said thong?
This is Jared Leto’s so-called life story. He was born December 26, 1971, in Bossier City, Louisiana. His earliest memory is lighting off firecrackers with his uncles and the smell of the matches. He moved almost every year. Colorado, California, Florida, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, a few places in Massachusetts. When he was twelve, he lived in Haiti. It was a nomadic, hippie lifestyle. Jared was surrounded by artists and photographers and thought he’d be one someday. I ask if his father was a photographer. “I don’t know,” he replies. “My father was not in the picture.” It is not a joke. His father left when Jared was young (how young, Jared won’t say). He later remarried and had two more sons; Jared has met them only once. When he talks about his father now, it is only to say he’s dead. I ask him what he remembers about his father. “I have to take a pass. Sorry,” he says. “Actually, I’m not sorry.”
Jared and his brother, Shannon, twenty months his senior, were raised by their mother, Constance. They were “food-stamp poor,” Jared recalls. The brothers had long hair and wore overalls and sandals; Mom grew her own alfalfa sprouts and made her own yogurt. “We’d sneak out to go crazy. We’d go to a friend’s house and eat Wonder bread and Fruit Loops.” For a while they had a black-and-white TV; the show they remember watching was Zoom.
For fun, he and Shannon played with a large cardboard box. “Forts were the best,” Jared recalls. He used to get a stuffed monkey every year. “I didn’t give them names, how weird is that? I usually burned them.” (He cackles melodramatically.) “Put firecrackers up their butts. Some idiot Freudian psychologist is going to go, ‘What does that mean?’”
I wonder what that psychologist would make of the fact that Jared claims he cannot remember his first sexual congress. “I hate to break it to you, but sex was just one of many things I was doing for the first time around that preteen age.” In fifth grade or sixth grade, he started developing a taste for trouble. “I was a bad boy,” he has said. “I hung with the freaks and did crazy things.”
You were a smart-ass? Partied a little bit?
“I did a lot of everything.”
He doesn’t think anyone will benefit from knowing these things. “It’s not going to help me - not that I need help in any way. I’ve had so much edge in my life, I don’t need to contrive any. I’m not gonna front like Mr. Angst.”
I suggest that these days, actors are expected to be brooding and troubled. “That’s the stupid thing - people think that they’re special or different just because they’re an actor. I think there’s a romantic notion about artistry and drugs because of the obvious creative impact that some drugs have in the short term. I think people enable performers to do drugs. It’s okay for them because they’re creating and that’s the lifestyle and they need it because they have such pressures. But I don’t think those are such great reasons. There are tons of people out there that go through problems, drug addiction, alcoholism, whatever. Look how many plumbers and construction workers, bankers and stock-market guys are walking around the corner buying bags of dope every day. I just think that human beings have an addictive nature.”
I ask Prefontaine director Steve James for any insights he might have about Jared’s adolescence. “I’ve always gotten the impression that it’s not an area to be pursued. I think Jared is a completely different guy today than he was when all of this stuff was going on.” James tells me how his own kids came out for the filming and how Jared totally bonded with them. “I don’t want this to sound schmaltzy, but the way I read it was that it was a very conscious thing with him, because I don’t think when he was a kid that he had that kind of attention.”
Jared, his brother, Shannon, and I drive to Anaheim for a Smashing Pumpkins concert. The first group the boys really loved was Kiss. The first band they formed was called the Noise Fucks. Shannon played drums. Jared played guitar (self-taught) and sang. They were sort of punk. Later Jared discovered classic rock. On My So-Called Life he sang three lines of the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.” (You can download the sound bite on the Internet.) Naturally, like every TV teenager from Ricky Nelson to Joey Lawrence, he was offered recording deals. No chance. “How stupid would that be?” he says.
Button noses aside, the brothers look about as alike as Robert Redford and Robert Downey Jr. Jared and Shannon are thisclose. They finish each other’s sentences, exchange coded looks, and speak in their own slang. On the way to the concert, Jared gets hungry. We pass a taco stand.
“That looks a little knuckley for me,” he says.
Meaning?
“Meaning knuckles in the meat. You better warm your jaw up, ‘cause you’re about to chew some knuckles big-time.”
Instead we plump for El Pollo Loco. Over dinner, Jared and Shannon describe their relationship growing up and going to a new school every year as “strength in numbers.” Shannon hung out on the set of My So-Called Life so much that he eventually was offered a small role. On Prefontaine, Jared’s contract stipulated that Shannon be his stand-in when they were setting up lighting for shots. Thanks to Jared, Shannon, an aspiring photographer, has seen his pictures of his brother published in Time.
They both live in Los Angeles, but as often as they can, they visit their mother, who is now remarried and living in New York. That’s the way Jared likes it. “It’s not like I’m hanging out at shopping malls or going to celebrity golf tournaments. I’m so in my own little world. I got my dog, my music, my brother, a couple of friends.”
The Pumpkins are not great. Low energy level. Lousy sound. Jared enjoys it anyway, throwing heavy-metal gestures at the end of each song. At one point Billy Corgan, perturbed by people lobbing love missiles toward the stage, pitches a hissy fit and warns the audience that the Pumpkins will leave the stage if anybody throws something at them. “Fuck you!” Jared cries in mock outrage. Then he turns to me, “I can’t believe people aren’t booing.” When the band finally do leave the stage, it takes a long time for the audience to coax them back for an encore. Before they start again, Jared pretends he’s Billy Corgan addressing his legions: “I’m sorry for the wait. I had diarrhea.”
A final meeting. For breakfast. Just a couple of puds at a place called Peckers. I notice that Jared is wearing black nail polish on two of his fingers. I notice this because he is rubbing, not quite picking, his nose a lot.
“I’m just a throbbing organism of nervous energy, kicking and twitching,” he says. “Am I a spacey guy, you think? Do you think I’m a freak? Do you think I’m ugly?”
Yes, I say, ragging on him, but the editors of magazines who call you one of “The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World” don’t.
“Oh, that makes me feel so good about myself,” he says sarcastically. “Let’s ask Scorsese. ‘Oh, I wanna hire that kid now. He’s beautiful. Wow!’”
It’s not just magazines, I continue, it’s men, women, children - and dogs, too.
“Well, thank them for me,” he says sincerely. “I bestow upon you the power to give gratitude.”
I ask him about his dreams. He tells me some: Being able to fly. Being able to breathe underwater. Being able to jump off buildings without getting hurt. He often dreams that he’s being eaten by sharks. It is not a metaphor for Hollywood, he says. “And I’m not gonna give Jaws the credit for seeping into my subconscious for all these years.” In some of his dreams he actually dies, though he knows you’re not supposed to.
I ask him about his most irrational fear. “The idea that I would ever end up on David Letterman or Jay Leno is horrifying.” He does not want to be any kind of role model for his generation. “I am such a freak in comparison to most other twenty-five-year-old guys. I have no idea what other people are thinking. I’m not really in touch.”
Well, of course, and what other young actor cliches are you guilty of?
“Wearing a leather jacket, having messy hair,” he replies with a sheepish smile. “But am I gonna start wearing sports jackets and a pompadour? I don’t think so.”
Oh, and one more cliché, one I could have guessed.
“I don’t like doing interviews,” Jared says. “I’m not pretending to be some superneurotic, hiding in my closet. I could care less about anybody knowing who I am, but I realize this is part of the game. Maybe if I really hated this whole public thing, I would go do plays in Hoboken.”
This is Jared Leto’s so-called life story. Five years ago, he was studying filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. He took a course called Acting for Directors and found his calling. Then, as legend would have it, he moved to Los Angeles, and without so much as a resume or a head shot found himself an agent within a week. (“I had a big mouth,” he explains. “Once I got in a room with people, I was even more vocal about my determination.”) He did guest spots on forgotten sitcoms like The Torkelsons and Camp Wilder. Then he auditioned for a show produced by the creators of thirtysomething. It was called My So-Called Life, a brilliantly written teen-something view of the mallternative nation. Jared won the role of high-school anti-hero Jordan Catalano, that obscure object of desire for Claire Danes’ character, Angela Chase. In one episode, Jordan is described thusly: “Fairly out of it, not unintelligent…sort of a stray puppy. He may even be a halfway decent person, but let me tell you…trouble…He’s way too gorgeous.”
Cool, mysterious, and deliberately underplayed, Jordan Catalano had that effect on most of the women in the show, but he spent much of his time leaning against high-school lockers, his eyes closed, or leaning into Claire Danes, their lips locked. Occasionally he uttered a “Huh?” or “Whatever,” as if awakening for a really excellent daydream.
Though the show lasted only nineteen episodes on ABC (it is now being rerun on MTV), Jordan Catalano lives on as an icon of male adolescence, and it is a measure of Jared Leto’s aspirations that he now considers his work on the show to be nothing more than an apprenticeship. Winnie Holzman, who created My So-Called Life, explains it to me: “In a way, he’s perverse - he’s somebody who wants to defeat the expectations you have about him, and I think he takes pleasure in that. He wants to be taken seriously; he does not want to cheapen himself.”
For any young actor looking to launch a career on the big screen, Jordan Catalano was the perfect role - too small to be scrutinized, too charismatic to be ignored. But for nearly two years after the series ended in 1994, Jared didn’t work much. He read scripts and turned down movies that were intended to capitalize on his good looks and his raging-hormones fans. He was intrigued enough by the concept behind Showtime’s Rebel Highway, a series of B-movie remakes, to star in an episode entitled The Cool and the Crazy with Alicia Silverstone, but the results were more lame than lurid. (It is a credit that has been summarily deleted from Leto’s official bio.) Later that year, he joined an enormous ensemble in 1995’s How to Make an American Quilt with Winona Ryder and Claire Danes for a role that he describes as “about three minutes long, but look at the cast. To put my toe in the pool of quality was fun.”
This year, he will appear alongside Dennis Quaid and Danny Glover in the Paramount Pictures feature Going West in America as a suspected serial killer, and play Frankie Griffin, a seventeen-year-old in the 1970s, in the Irish indie The Last of the High Kings. (Though it received warm reviews in Ireland, the film has not yet been scheduled for a U.S. release.)
But the true test of Jared Leto’s talent and range comes this month when he stars in Prefontaine, which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Prefontaine is the real-life story of the cocky, charismatic long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine, who smashed all the existing American records in the three-mile event in the ’70s and helped turn track into a high-profile sport. At twenty-one, he lived through the kidnapping and killings of Israeli hostages in the 1972 Munich Olympics just days before his big race. After a strong start, he fell behind in the last two hundred yards and finished fourth. He returned to the U.S., turning down $250,000 to join a pro track league. Instead, he remained an amateur, and later, after run-ins with the Amateur Athletics Union, bacame an advocate for athletes’ rights until he died, tragically, in a car crash in 1975. The story is so compelling, such a star-making vehicle, that Tom Cruise is producing another version of it with Billy Crudup in the title role, to be released later this year.
Leto’s version, budgeted at $8 million, is directed by Steve James, fresh from his success with the award-winning documentary Hoop Dreams. It is a gamble for them both: James’s first major-studio feature, and Leto’s first starring role. Jared’s resemblance to Prefontaine was striking enough, and after his reading he had everyone convinced he could play the part. He immersed himself in his character’s life, meeting Prefontaine’s family and training for six weeks with one of Pre’s college roommates. He adopted Pre’s voice and unique, upright, running style. He wore a walrus mustache and muttonchop sideburns, a pink polyester blazer and bell-bottoms. (“It’s funny. As soon as you put on those pants, your body just goes a different way.”) The transformation was so complete that when Steve’s sister, Linda Prefontaine, first saw Jared in charater, she broke down and cried.
On the set, James remembers, Jared could be “extremely private, to the point of being noncommunicative - he really gets wrapped up in what he’s playing.” Whatever his method, James says, Leto nailed Prefontaine. “You witness this guy go from being immature and a bit of an asshole to a leader of men without it being hokey. And I know I’m prejudiced, but I think Jared does a great job of showing this guy change.”
I meet Jared Leto at the spanish-style house he rents in Hollywood. We are going on a hike. (His other suggestions: going to a shooting range or bungee jumping.) He steps out of the house in an Adidas shirt and Nike track pants. With his shaggy hair and beard he looks like a latter-day teenage Jesus. Judas, the half-wolf/half-husky he adopted a year ago, betrays him with a kiss.
Right on my lips. “He licked you?” Jared asks me. “You better not make me jealous.”
In person, there are two things about Jared Leto that you notice immediately. First, his smile. It is the smile of a little boy who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar but is confident he’ll get to eat the Oreo nonetheless. When he is asked to do it on-camera, he calls that smile “corny.” Then, his stare, unblinking, a little unsettling. (“Those eyes have a magnetic effect on women,” says Claire Danes.) It is also the stare that you use to assert yourself against vice principals and other assholes, and the stare you use when you are daydreaming and don’t want anyone to know it.
We barrel along in Jared’s GM Yukon, Marilyn Manson blasting on the CD player. When we reach the hills of Pacific Palisades, Judas leads the way along the winding dirt trails. Still in condition from the running he did in Prefontaine, Jared bounds after his dog. I trudge steadily behind. After a mile or so, we settle on a large boulder. As Jared scratches glyphs into the rock, we talk. I ask about his past, which is cloudy in detail; he stonewalls me, as if it has no relevance.
He is not the type of actor who reels off wistful memories, witty anecdotes, or poignant life lessons. It’s as though he has arrived here, at the threshold of celebrity, without any baggage at all. And I am not the type to let him check in without asking where it is. But first I royally screw up, by pronouncing his name “lee-dough.” “It’s ‘let-o,’” he corrects me nicely. He tells me it’s a name his mother married into, not a stage name, as some people have speculated. “I don’t know why I would ever think of Jared Leto.”
If you really want to get under his skin, ask Jared Leto about the quote that has found its way onto the Internet: “I fall in love with every beautiful girl I meet.” “That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” he splutters. “I’m about the most opposite of that statement you could ever imagine. Where do you get this shit?”
I reach in my pocket and pull out a printout of the First Unofficial Jared Leto Homepage. We read through it. They’ve got some things right: He likes veggies and popcorn and he has a Burton Air snowboard; he worked as a dishwasher at twelve (“at the Three Pigs Barbecue in Virginia”); he hates shaving, likes Nirvana (along with Juliana Hatfield, Bikini Kill, and the Young Pioneers). They are often off on his height and the fact that dropping out of school in tenth grade was his biggest regret. (“No. Never. I think public school is the Dark Ages. And they neglect to say I went back.”) He shrugs. He’s been impersonated online before. “I don’t even have an e-mail address. The scary thing about the Internet is that people believe whatever they read. Especially on a computer because it makes it seem more factual.” Like the “fact” that he does not like Spam. “Yeah, now I’m gonna get people calling me up, ‘What’s wrong with Spam, motherfucker?’”
If I really want to get inside his head, Jared Leto suggests, I should start on the outside. “I was abducted once when I was younger, actually my whole family was,” he explains with utmost sincerity. “And I have these little pattern scars on my head, but you’d have to shave my hair off to see them. You’d get to know a lot about me if you knew how to read the encrypted patterns.” For a moment, I am taken in. Then he breaks an I’ve-got-ya grin. “But you’d definitely have to have been taken away to the mother ship and taught to read the language.”
In a strange and simple way, he is an alien. But I am learning a bit of his language - his sly smile, the way he touches my arm to emphasize a point, the way he compliments me on a question rather than answering it. In conversation, Leto is witty and sharp, though he knows sarcasm doesn’t translate into print. He hasn’t done many interviews, and what he lacks in enthusiasm he makes up for with evasion; ask him too many personal questions and his force field goes up.
“I have no desire to show the world my dirty underwear.”
Maybe he is just covering his assets, protecting his feelings - the currency of any actor - from the cannibalism of a tabloid-driven society. Maybe he has learned the lessons of the overindulgent Brat Pack and the self-indulgent skank idols who sneak guns on airplanes, shoot drugs, or smash hotel rooms. Maybe he doesn’t want to burn out in a fireball of hype. Maybe he has seen fame in the late ’90s for what it is: invasive and unforgiving. So he engages in the process with caution and care. He has negotiated the terms of his compromise. I will tell you enough to keep you intrigued, but you shall never truly know me.
One thing he will share, an observation about the whole business of success: “That being content with yourself has so little to do with materialistic accomplishments. So many people have tried to get happiness and serenity from outside things; it’s pretty much common knowledge that that is a road to nowhere. I’ve never heard anybody say, ‘Fame made me the complete person I am.’ Well, I’m sure people have said it, but nobody I respect.”
After our hike, we go to the Reel Inn in Malibu. Jared’s treat. I have shrimp cocktail; he has crab cakes. He orders a root beer, and the waitress inexplicably asks for his ID. Perhaps she recognizes him. Inexplicably, he hands over his license. Perhaps he’s flirting.
“What do you do?” she asks.
“I’m a long-distance runner,” he replies. “My name is Steve.”
“It says Jared on your license.”
“Steve is my middle name,” he explains.
“People think he’s an actor,” I explain.
“You don’t look like an actor,” she says. “The manager thinks you’re a surfer.”
We eat outside and talk about things that matter to him: “I’m really attracted to organic processes. I can barely say that with a straight face, but it’s true. Acting, music, painting, anything. Not to sound too artsy-smartsy, but it’s all expression.” He tells me he is reading a history of Method acting, how it came to fruition in America, its connection to McCarthyism, and how whether you’re a soap star or a Broadway legend, it’s basically the American style of acting. He thinks we are all actors. “Even babies. You want milk, you cry.”
He tells me he’d like to do a film version of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, the true story of a young man who took off on an odyssey in Alaska, survived off the wilderness for almost four months, and then perished. Another guy his age who died young. Jared always believed he himself would die young, but he says he’s never fantasized about his own funeral. “Well,” he admits, “I’m sure I’ve thought about it at some point. I’m sure I’ve had a nice pity party on the toilet.”
ME: Well, can you cry on cue?
JARED: I can feel pain on cue. I can get inside myself and sometimes there are tears. I go for a long, long time without crying. The more you do it, it’s easier to do.
ME: Do you ever look in the mirror when you cry?
JARED: If I’m ever at a really dramatic, emotional moment in my life, there’s a little part of me that goes, “Remember this, always.”
I ask him if he can be happy on cue and he tells me this story about finding a wallet he’s had for a very long time. “Me and my brother stole it when I was in fifth grade. There were some Harley-Davidson bikers, big scary guys playing football on this hill, and one of the guys laid down a black leather chain wallet. Me and my brother saw it, gave each other the quick sideways look, and snuck over, stole it, and just tore ass.”
ME: You stole a Hell’s Angel’s wallet?
JARED: (blasé) That was nothing.
ME: Nothing? Ever been arrested?
JARED: (as if he didn’t hear me) What did you say?
ME: (louder) Were you ever arrested?
JARED: (staring me down) Was I what?
ME: Ever arrested for anything?
JARED: (quietly befuddled) What are you talking about? (briskly changing the subject) What are you drinking?
ME: I’m drinking truth serum, have some?
JARED: (looking at my drink) You know, if you suck on those old school paper straws too long, you start getting pulp in your mouth.
Another day, another meal, we play a game called “Either/Or.” Tortoise or hare? (pause) Hare. I wish I was more patient. I think most people do. Plan or impulse? Impulse. I’m spontaneous. I pick up and just take a drive for the weekend. If I hear a friend is going somewhere…not that I have any friends. High-school jock or parking-lot slacker? More like a toilet troll. How do you like that one, huh? Basketball or hockey?
The only sport I ever played on a team was hockey. I played right wing. I only played for a while because we moved from the North to the South, and who plays hockey in the South? It costs a million dollars. Democrat or Republican? Neither, I gave it up for Bill. He owes me one. Bill Murray or Rodney Dangerfield? Bill Murray. He’s a funny motherfucker. A smart guy. Jesus or Satan? Definitely Satan. He’s so much cooler. Sting or the Police? I thought it would be like Mudhoney or the Melvins. Then it would have to be both. Madonna or Courtney? Pass. Scorsese or Coppola? When I was a kid my mom would take me to cool films all the time. I grew up with the great films of Scorsese. What are you going to say bout Scorsese? He’s the King. Hemingway or Fitzgerald? Neither. When I want something literary, I go to the magazine store. That’s a joke. I usually have four books going. When I was real young, the books that I reread were the Narnia chronicles by C.S. Lewis. They were fantasy with some undercover kind of religious ideas snuck in there. Pro-life or pro-choice? Ah, you get personal, don’t you? You’re bold. I like that. Pro-choice. (leans back in his chair, gestures to the heavens) Let the bombs come. Let ‘em, I’m ready. Briefs or boxers? You know how many times I have been asked that? At least three. You gotta come up with a better one than that. Okay, thong or jockstrap? (laughs) What if I said thong?
This is Jared Leto’s so-called life story. He was born December 26, 1971, in Bossier City, Louisiana. His earliest memory is lighting off firecrackers with his uncles and the smell of the matches. He moved almost every year. Colorado, California, Florida, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, a few places in Massachusetts. When he was twelve, he lived in Haiti. It was a nomadic, hippie lifestyle. Jared was surrounded by artists and photographers and thought he’d be one someday. I ask if his father was a photographer. “I don’t know,” he replies. “My father was not in the picture.” It is not a joke. His father left when Jared was young (how young, Jared won’t say). He later remarried and had two more sons; Jared has met them only once. When he talks about his father now, it is only to say he’s dead. I ask him what he remembers about his father. “I have to take a pass. Sorry,” he says. “Actually, I’m not sorry.”
Jared and his brother, Shannon, twenty months his senior, were raised by their mother, Constance. They were “food-stamp poor,” Jared recalls. The brothers had long hair and wore overalls and sandals; Mom grew her own alfalfa sprouts and made her own yogurt. “We’d sneak out to go crazy. We’d go to a friend’s house and eat Wonder bread and Fruit Loops.” For a while they had a black-and-white TV; the show they remember watching was Zoom.
For fun, he and Shannon played with a large cardboard box. “Forts were the best,” Jared recalls. He used to get a stuffed monkey every year. “I didn’t give them names, how weird is that? I usually burned them.” (He cackles melodramatically.) “Put firecrackers up their butts. Some idiot Freudian psychologist is going to go, ‘What does that mean?’”
I wonder what that psychologist would make of the fact that Jared claims he cannot remember his first sexual congress. “I hate to break it to you, but sex was just one of many things I was doing for the first time around that preteen age.” In fifth grade or sixth grade, he started developing a taste for trouble. “I was a bad boy,” he has said. “I hung with the freaks and did crazy things.”
You were a smart-ass? Partied a little bit?
“I did a lot of everything.”
He doesn’t think anyone will benefit from knowing these things. “It’s not going to help me - not that I need help in any way. I’ve had so much edge in my life, I don’t need to contrive any. I’m not gonna front like Mr. Angst.”
I suggest that these days, actors are expected to be brooding and troubled. “That’s the stupid thing - people think that they’re special or different just because they’re an actor. I think there’s a romantic notion about artistry and drugs because of the obvious creative impact that some drugs have in the short term. I think people enable performers to do drugs. It’s okay for them because they’re creating and that’s the lifestyle and they need it because they have such pressures. But I don’t think those are such great reasons. There are tons of people out there that go through problems, drug addiction, alcoholism, whatever. Look how many plumbers and construction workers, bankers and stock-market guys are walking around the corner buying bags of dope every day. I just think that human beings have an addictive nature.”
I ask Prefontaine director Steve James for any insights he might have about Jared’s adolescence. “I’ve always gotten the impression that it’s not an area to be pursued. I think Jared is a completely different guy today than he was when all of this stuff was going on.” James tells me how his own kids came out for the filming and how Jared totally bonded with them. “I don’t want this to sound schmaltzy, but the way I read it was that it was a very conscious thing with him, because I don’t think when he was a kid that he had that kind of attention.”
Jared, his brother, Shannon, and I drive to Anaheim for a Smashing Pumpkins concert. The first group the boys really loved was Kiss. The first band they formed was called the Noise Fucks. Shannon played drums. Jared played guitar (self-taught) and sang. They were sort of punk. Later Jared discovered classic rock. On My So-Called Life he sang three lines of the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.” (You can download the sound bite on the Internet.) Naturally, like every TV teenager from Ricky Nelson to Joey Lawrence, he was offered recording deals. No chance. “How stupid would that be?” he says.
Button noses aside, the brothers look about as alike as Robert Redford and Robert Downey Jr. Jared and Shannon are thisclose. They finish each other’s sentences, exchange coded looks, and speak in their own slang. On the way to the concert, Jared gets hungry. We pass a taco stand.
“That looks a little knuckley for me,” he says.
Meaning?
“Meaning knuckles in the meat. You better warm your jaw up, ‘cause you’re about to chew some knuckles big-time.”
Instead we plump for El Pollo Loco. Over dinner, Jared and Shannon describe their relationship growing up and going to a new school every year as “strength in numbers.” Shannon hung out on the set of My So-Called Life so much that he eventually was offered a small role. On Prefontaine, Jared’s contract stipulated that Shannon be his stand-in when they were setting up lighting for shots. Thanks to Jared, Shannon, an aspiring photographer, has seen his pictures of his brother published in Time.
They both live in Los Angeles, but as often as they can, they visit their mother, who is now remarried and living in New York. That’s the way Jared likes it. “It’s not like I’m hanging out at shopping malls or going to celebrity golf tournaments. I’m so in my own little world. I got my dog, my music, my brother, a couple of friends.”
The Pumpkins are not great. Low energy level. Lousy sound. Jared enjoys it anyway, throwing heavy-metal gestures at the end of each song. At one point Billy Corgan, perturbed by people lobbing love missiles toward the stage, pitches a hissy fit and warns the audience that the Pumpkins will leave the stage if anybody throws something at them. “Fuck you!” Jared cries in mock outrage. Then he turns to me, “I can’t believe people aren’t booing.” When the band finally do leave the stage, it takes a long time for the audience to coax them back for an encore. Before they start again, Jared pretends he’s Billy Corgan addressing his legions: “I’m sorry for the wait. I had diarrhea.”
A final meeting. For breakfast. Just a couple of puds at a place called Peckers. I notice that Jared is wearing black nail polish on two of his fingers. I notice this because he is rubbing, not quite picking, his nose a lot.
“I’m just a throbbing organism of nervous energy, kicking and twitching,” he says. “Am I a spacey guy, you think? Do you think I’m a freak? Do you think I’m ugly?”
Yes, I say, ragging on him, but the editors of magazines who call you one of “The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World” don’t.
“Oh, that makes me feel so good about myself,” he says sarcastically. “Let’s ask Scorsese. ‘Oh, I wanna hire that kid now. He’s beautiful. Wow!’”
It’s not just magazines, I continue, it’s men, women, children - and dogs, too.
“Well, thank them for me,” he says sincerely. “I bestow upon you the power to give gratitude.”
I ask him about his dreams. He tells me some: Being able to fly. Being able to breathe underwater. Being able to jump off buildings without getting hurt. He often dreams that he’s being eaten by sharks. It is not a metaphor for Hollywood, he says. “And I’m not gonna give Jaws the credit for seeping into my subconscious for all these years.” In some of his dreams he actually dies, though he knows you’re not supposed to.
I ask him about his most irrational fear. “The idea that I would ever end up on David Letterman or Jay Leno is horrifying.” He does not want to be any kind of role model for his generation. “I am such a freak in comparison to most other twenty-five-year-old guys. I have no idea what other people are thinking. I’m not really in touch.”
Well, of course, and what other young actor cliches are you guilty of?
“Wearing a leather jacket, having messy hair,” he replies with a sheepish smile. “But am I gonna start wearing sports jackets and a pompadour? I don’t think so.”
Oh, and one more cliché, one I could have guessed.
“I don’t like doing interviews,” Jared says. “I’m not pretending to be some superneurotic, hiding in my closet. I could care less about anybody knowing who I am, but I realize this is part of the game. Maybe if I really hated this whole public thing, I would go do plays in Hoboken.”
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