Why does Jared Leto still have a career?

This weekend, Tron: Ares releases across US cinemas, and is expected to make a decent, rather than record-setting, amount of money in its opening weekend. It is a curious film franchise in that neither of the two films that precede it are especially beloved, but both have iconic soundtracks composed, respectively, by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos and French electro duo Daft Punk. (The honors this time around fall to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, aka Nine Inch Nails.) Yet whatever the strengths and weaknesses of Tron: Ares – and the early reviews have not been kind – there is one aspect that can only make audiences groan in anticipation, and that is the casting of its star, Jared Leto.

It is difficult to describe how spectacular Leto’s fall from public grace has been, and not simply because of incidents reported earlier this year in which he was accused of sexual misconduct with a series of women – claims he denies and that have not resulted in any further action. It is more because Leto, a famously handsome Oscar-winning actor and frontman of the commercially successful band Thirty Seconds To Mars, resembles a cautionary tale for our times. Give a talented, quirky young man all the fame and adulation that he could ever imagine, and watch him teeter under it. Let’s call it Shia LaBeouf syndrome.

There is no reason why it had to be like this. Leto began his career opposite Claire Danes in the still-excellent Nineties teen series My So-Called Life. He took an apparent delight in dismantling his heartthrob image. He was excellent in films as varied as Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and Mary Harron’s American Psycho, collaborated with David Fincher on Fight Club and Panic Room and was a convincingly vanity-free Mark Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin, in Chapter 27. Even as his band went stratospheric and he seemed to be lost to music rather than acting, he rebounded with an Oscar-winning performance in Dallas Buyers’ Club as a trans woman dying of AIDS. Back when that film was made in 2013, the idea of a heterosexual male actor playing such a role did not offend wider sensibilities, and Leto, who never broke character during filming, was lauded for his bravery and daring, rather than pilloried for, of all things, acting.

Unfortunately, the film’s success and acclaim also turned Leto from an interesting and versatile actor into a tiresome attention-seeker. Few could have done anything to rescue Suicide Squad from torpor, admittedly. Yet Leto was not only tedious as the Joker on-screen, but his off-screen pranks – which included giving his co-stars “gifts” of used condoms and live rats – demonstrated that he now began to think of himself as A Great Thespian. As he grandly said a few years ago, “I’m an artist at the end of the day. If I do something risky and you don’t like it, basically, you can kiss my ass.”

Leto’s “art” has not, so far, resulted in performances that the average cinemagoer would like. He was the worst thing about the otherwise excellent Blade Runner sequel as the blind tech mogul Niander Wallace – in a role earmarked for another musician-actor, David Bowie – and his tic-laden performance as a suspected serial killer in The Little Things was so annoying that when he is finally murdered by an exasperated Rami Malek, it is all you can do not to cheer. But worse was to come. Leto decided that he, too, needed a superhero franchise, and so he appeared as a vampire in the dismal Morbius, which flopped heavily. It was a mark of how bad the film was that it went viral for its perceived shoddiness, and that its desperate distributors Sony re-released it in the hope that it would become a camp classic of sorts: audiences were too savvy to be taken in.

On a personal level, he (rightly) became a laughingstock March 2020, shortly after the outbreak of Covid and subsequent lockdown, for tweeting, “Wow. 12 days ago I began a silent meditation in the desert. We were totally isolated. No phone, no communication etc. We had no idea what was happening outside the facility.” It reinforced the idea of the actor as solipsistic and out-of-touch, someone whose Art cannot be affected by such trivial things as a global pandemic, and made him seem even more annoying than before.

Yet Leto still can surprise, in a good way, when he can be bothered. His scenery-chewing performance in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci as Paolo Gucci, speaking in an accent that sounds like a Little Italy ice cream vendor, was widely panned by critics, but it’s a hilarious piece of opera buffa that peaks when Leto, encased in prosthetics like a circus attraction, says of his imprisoned papa, “how can I think about my line when my father could be dropping the soap!” It demonstrated that Leto can still be an excellent character actor of great versatility – and humor – when he is not trying so damn hard.

Tron: Ares represents Leto the movie star, and it is a tiresome thing now to see. Yet weirdly, his next performance, as the villainous Skeletor in Masters of the Universe, could be a return to form of some kind. In the Eighties version of the film, Frank Langella stole the show from beneath a ton of make-up as the campy nemesis of He-Man. If Leto channels a similar sense of fun, then a whole new career could open up to him, with this most earnest of actors – or artists – not taking himself so seriously. If so, then he could yet recapture the promise of his earlier career. But if not, we will be stuck with an awful lot more movies like this one, with a lot more irritating, self-regarding performances by an actor who really does know better.