It shouldn’t be a shock that some of the wild stories shared about Jared Leto on the set of Suicide Squad might not be entirely true. There’s sure to be a mix of fiction tossed in thanks to that Joker unpredictability that the character has been known for in the past on comics pages, but you did at least believe Leto going to the edge thanks to his method acting. The guy did gain a bunch of weight to play Mark David Chapman by eating “diet heavy with microwaved pints of ice cream mixed with olive oil and soy sauce” according to The Hollywood Reporter. He also apparently got gout and pushed his cholesterol to its unmedicated limits.
That kind of commitment adds to the legitimacy of those set rumors, but now Leto seems to be taking it back a bit and admitting that it wasn’t true according to an interview with Entertainment Weekly Radio on SiriusXM:
“Most of it was total bullsh–,” he says of reports he went above and beyond for the twisted villain. For example? “Like that I was giving used condoms to people, which was not true,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how loud you shout or hold up a sign with your pants off in Times Square — people will run the story that they want.”
Who knew that Jared Leto would make up crazy things? Clearly we should’ve listened to David Ayer when he said they weren’t actually used condoms. The legend became reality, so we made sure the legend included used condoms.
So looking back, all those wild stories were a clever mix of wild fiction and reality. While there was likely a dead pig and bullets passed around as gifts, I’m not so sure about the live rat. It’s easy to get one, sure, but it was also probably a gerbil. And the dead pig was definitely cooked with an apple in its mouth. Jared Leto is just a king of BBQ.
That said, the antics and stories worked. People ate it up, even if they didn’t believe it at the time. While we’re pretty sure he did partially blind himself for Blade Runner 2049, don’t believe any stories about him actually creating his own robots or burning his retinas to achieve authenticity. He bought a roomba and glued eyes to it.
(Via i09 / Entertainment Weekly / Rolling Stone / E! News)