THE THINEST OF TAKES

NARRATIVE OFTEN HINGES ON ECCENTRIC SUPPORTING ACTOR ROLE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Directors cast Jared Leto when the script calls for a slice of eccentricity in an important supporting role.

Leto puts on a body suit and facial prosthetic for the role of Poalo Gucci in House of Gucci (2021).  Director Ridley Scott needed an actor who could portray an underappreciated buffoon.

Director Denis Villeneuve uses Leto as a cold calculating industrialist of the future in Blade Runner: 2049 (2017). Leto even loses his eyes to play the role of oligarch Niander Wallace.

Leto had previously joined the debauchery of a deteriorating court of Alexander the Great in Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004). Alexander fought to establish a great empire, but wine and the carnival pleasures of his inner circle would be the emperor’s downfall.

In The Panic Room (2002), Leto plays an unhappy heir who breaks into his deceased father’s family home to steal a secret stash of bearer bonds. Leto shows how a burglar becomes more and more erratic the more things go contrary to a hastily drafted home invasion plan.

The Leto character is extremely linear and often only a very slim sliver of the personalities that exist within society, but he is as skilled and focused as a rock climber, with that same patience, relied upon when stuck on the mountain side, to wait for the camera to come around.