Method Actor Extraordinaire Jared Leto appears to see the world through different lenses. That’s one way to put it, which makes it easy for people to fire shots at him for learning of the pandemic after emerging from a “silent meditation” retreat in the desert. Leto counts himself among the many actors who have recently played notorious grifters, and he sat down with Amanda Seyfried (who recently portrayed Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout) for a Variety chat that also highlighted Leto’s turn as disgraced WeWork CEO Adam Neumann in Apple TV+’s WeCrashed.
The Variety discussion revolved heavily around discussion of Holmes, who awaits sentencing on multiple fraud convictions after raking in $700 million to fund her snake-oil/sham Theranos blood-testing methods. She was allegedly merciless while attempting to keep her house of cards afloat, even (according to Vanity Fair) caring much less about Theranos chief scientist Ian Gibbons’ suicide than about his documents that could send her further down the test tubes.
Despite all of that, Leto communicated that Holmes (who he once presented, as seen above, with a Woman of the Year Award at a Glamour ceremony) was quite lovely back in 2015, and he stayed in touch with her. While Leto spoke with Seyfried, there were apparent shades of sympathy that surfaced:
“I had heard her speak in Palo Alto. She was great onstage. She was incredibly smart, funny — and then I met her after that, and I liked her a lot. But no indication that things weren’t great in her life and at the company. And then I gave her an award. And now I’m here with you. We stayed in touch after that and talked a few times, but my experience with her was always quite lovely. Not everyone is one thing. No one is one thing. Did you want to meet her?”
Whether or not Jared was kind-of joking, there’s no indication. He did clarify that he hasn’t spoken to Holmes “in some time.”
Amanda Seyfried asks Jared Leto if he's still in contact with Elizabeth Holmes—and laughs when he hesitates before answering her.
"I haven't spoken to her in some time," he clarifies.https://t.co/BY5NEJoPaN pic.twitter.com/5FmIlj4mcn
— Variety (@Variety) June 14, 2022
From there, Seyfried confirmed that she wanted to meet Holmes before portraying her, but that wasn’t in the cards. Leto offered to put the two in touch (“You want to pass your number along or something?”), and Seyfried waved this away with a “No, no, no. It’s not the time” and a declaration that “it’s really messy.” Unlike Leto, Seyfried refrains from saying much about how she actually feels about Holmes except that the portrayal was done with a careful balance of “both compassion and worthiness,” and then Seyfried offered, “[W]hatever she’s sentenced with, it’s what she deserves.”
From there, Leto appeared to not be too wild about his time on 1990s cult favorite series My So Called Life. “I barely spoke in the project that I did,” he declared. “I think I was in probably two minutes of every episode.” That’s accurate. He leaned against a lot of lockers in that show, though, and it still made more overall sense than “Morbin’ Time.”
(Via Variety)