(Credit: Alamy)
Jared Leto is an actor known for embodying the roles he takes on. His commitment to his performances extends beyond the screen and beyond the set. Famously, when working on his portrayal of the cackling Batman villain, the Joker, for 2016’s Suicide Squad, Leto would send his co-stars signed gifts from the clown prince of crime. These gifts included sending Margot Robbie a live rat in a box.
Leto’s film career began in the late 1990s. He quickly became a recognised talent through films such as Fight Club, Girl, Interrupted, and American Psycho before getting a chance to show his true skill in the 2000 Darren Aronofsky psychological drama Requiem for a Dream. In 2013, he earned himself an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, playing a trans woman in the 1980s set Dallas Buyers Club.
This award is one he shares with fellow Joker, the late Heath Ledger, whose lauded performance as the maniacal villain in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is still regarded by many as one of the best on-screen antagonists of all time. Ledger would be given the Academy Award posthumously, breaking a long-held stigma that saw the awards recognise performances in comic-book-based movies for the first time.
Ledger’s own career spans just over ten years of work, cut short by his death in 2008, but he showed the signs of an actor on the brink of reaching the heights of success he was worthy of, turns in 2001’s A Knight’s Tale displayed Ledger’s on-screen charisma and balanced his comedic chops with moments of gravitas. 2005’s Brokeback Mountain showed Ledger was able to take on true drama and hold the screen with other greats of his generation, like co-star Jake Gyllenhaal.
The infamy surrounding Ledger’s untimely death by accidental drug overdose, the timing of it coinciding with his own apparent commitment to the role of the Joker, gives the performance a cult-like mythos that many close to Ledger were quick to disavow. In spite of that, the stories persist and help to elevate the performance to the degree we still see today, despite multiple actors having taken on the role since, including not just Leto, but Joaquin Phoenix, whose performance in 2019’s Joker earned him the award for ‘Best Actor’, and pulled in over $1billion at the box office, making for an inevitable sequel that releases next month.
Speaking of Ledger’s performance, when preparing for his own iteration to be released, Leto said: “Heath did an impeccable, perfect performance as the Joker”. The two actors never worked together, and Leto says that he “didn’t know him well” but recognised Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight as “one of the best performances ever in cinema”.
Leto’s Joker would not reach the acclaim that his predecessor and successor managed to reach. As part of the now-defunct DC universe of comic book movies spearheaded by Zack Snyder, his performance never really made it out of a handful of scenes across two movies – perhaps if given more time to live with the role, Leto would have shown us what he was capable of under that iconic, villainous face paint.
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