For lack of a better word, Jared Leto has always been deemed as something of a peculiar individual. That’s not to say he isn’t great at his job, as an Academy Award win would attest, but in both his personal and professional life he always seems to take things at least one step farther than he really has to.
Whether it’s piling on so much weight for Chapter 27 that he gave himself gout and ended up in a wheelchair, putting in contact lenses for Blade Runner 2049 that rendered him legally blind, bestowing his Suicide Squad co-stars with a series of bizarre gifts, or completely missing the start of the pandemic because he’d been meditating for two weeks at an isolated and technology-free retreat in the desert, he’s definitely a little out there.
Leto’s latest unrecognizable performance sees him buried under a mountain of prosthetics in Ridley Scott’s true-life drama House of Gucci, and during an interview with i-D, the 49-year-old described getting into character as Paolo Gucci in perhaps the most stereotypical way you could possibly imagine.
“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. If you took a biopsy of my skin, it would come back as parmesan cheese! This is my love letter to Italy. There was a lot of work and preparation, and yes, I had an Italian accent and I enjoyed and embraced that, and lived in that space as much as I could, and for as long as I possibly could. I climbed into that creative cave and came out through the bowels and intestines into the esophagus of the one and only Paolo Gucci.”
If Chris Pratt is getting backlash for not being Italian enough to voice Super Mario in an animated movie, then we can only guess what people will have to say about Leto’s comments.