Jared Leto: Stop Ruining Franchises!!!!

There’s method acting, and then there’s whatever the hell Jared Leto is doing. Somewhere along the way — probably between mailing dead rats to his coworkers and making Morbius — Leto stopped being an actor and became a cautionary tale about what happens when commitment mutates into ego.

Hollywood’s been seduced by his brand of chaos for years: the haunted blue eyes, the chameleon intensity, the rock star edge. But beneath the surface, there’s something hollow — a man so obsessed with proving his artistic genius that he’s forgotten how to simply act. Jared Leto doesn’t disappear into characters. He swallows them whole, then forces the audience to watch him chew.

Jared Leto’s favorite word is “method.” He wears it like a crown — or maybe a shield. When his performances flop, he hides behind it; when they work, he weaponizes it. He’s turned “I’m a method actor” into both an excuse and a PR strategy. Let’s be real: the man treats acting like an Olympic event. Every role has to be some masochistic journey through human suffering. Lost 40 pounds? Method. Spoke in an accent for six months? Method. Refused to break character long enough to be a decent coworker? You guessed it — method.

Except, somewhere between Brando’s tortured brilliance and Leto’s self-inflicted performance art, the meaning of “method” got lost. It’s supposed to be about empathy — about finding the truth of a person. Leto’s version is about endurance. It’s a test of how much bullshit he and everyone around him can survive before the cameras even roll.

There’s commitment, and then there’s Jared Leto limping to the bathroom on crutches during Morbius because “that’s what the character would do.” Newsflash, Jared: you’re not curing cancer. You’re in a movie about a vampire doctor that turned into a meme before it even hit theaters.

The sad part is, Jared Leto can act. He proved it — twice. Once in Requiem for a Dream, he delivered a performance so devastating it made audiences feel like they needed rehab afterward. And again in Dallas Buyers Club, where he transformed himself into Rayon, a trans woman with heartbreaking vulnerability. That role earned him an Oscar, and deservedly so. Then something shifted. Maybe success curdled into self-worship. Maybe he started believing his own hype. But since 2013, every Leto performance has felt like a performance of performance — artifice stacked on artifice. He’s not playing characters anymore; he’s auditioning for sainthood.

Take his Joker in Suicide Squad. Instead of redefining the character, he turned it into a viral marketing stunt. Dead rats. Used condoms. Bullets in the mail. A trail of confused, traumatized co-stars wondering if HR could exorcise demons. For all that “dedication,” his actual screen time amounted to a few minutes of Hot Topic chaos and some bad tattoos.

Then there’s Blade Runner 2049, where he played Niander Wallace — a blind, techno-messianic villain who whispered every line like he was trying to seduce Siri. It was all pomp, no presence. The kind of performance that mistakes slowness for depth. And who could forget House of Gucci? The accent. The prosthetics. The inexplicable choice to act like Waluigi possessed by Andy Kaufman. You could practically hear Ridley Scott muttering, “What the hell is he doing?” from behind the camera. Leto’s problem isn’t transformation — it’s that his transformations are louder than the roles. Every project becomes another shrine to his own commitment, another sermon in the Church of Jared.

There’s a particular kind of actor who can’t help but consume every frame they’re in. Jack Nicholson had it, but he balanced it with charm. Joaquin Phoenix has it, but he channels it into raw humanity. Leto? He weaponizes it like a mirrorball made of narcissism. He’s not content to be a part of the movie — he is the movie, whether it makes sense or not. His performances are gravitational. Scenes bend around him. Plots collapse. Everything else — direction, tone, emotional nuance — gets sucked into the orbit of his self-importance.

That’s why no film he’s been in since Dallas Buyers Club feels cohesive. He’s too busy performing the performance to play the damn role. Jared Leto doesn’t trust silence. He doesn’t trust stillness. He doesn’t trust that the audience might find meaning without him announcing, “Look at how hard I’m acting!” There’s a reason every director who works with him sounds vaguely traumatized afterward. You don’t direct Jared Leto — you survive him.

And then, of course, came Morbius. The movie that launched a thousand ironic tweets. The cinematic disaster was so bad that it got re-released because the internet was making fun of it. Leto treated Morbius like Shakespeare in fangs. Interviews full of pseudo-spiritual nonsense about transformation and darkness, all for a movie that barely qualified as coherent. When audiences mocked it with “It’s Morbin’ time,” he didn’t get it. He never gets it. He’s too far inside the myth of himself to hear the laughter. Leto wants to be a misunderstood genius. The problem is, he’s perfectly understood — just not in the way he hopes.

You’d think, after Morbius, Gucci, and the Suicide Squad debacle, Hollywood would move on. But somehow, they keep giving him roles. It’s like the industry is stuck in an abusive relationship with its own fascination. They see the Oscar, the cheekbones, the mystique — and they forget that charisma without substance is just noise. Jared Leto represents the worst kind of Hollywood hubris: the belief that weird equals brilliant, that intensity equals depth. In truth, he’s the poster boy for performative artistry — a man more interested in being seen as great than in doing something great.

What Leto needs — more than another “transformative” role or another layer of prosthetic glue — is a return to simplicity. A film where he’s forced to strip away all the artifice, all the method cosplay, and just listen. The Rock, whom I wrote a piece just like this one did that very thing and is now getting praises for The Smashing Machine despite being a box office bomb.

Because when you scrape off the pretension, there’s still a flicker of the actor who made Requiem unforgettable. Somewhere beneath the layers of theatrical martyrdom, there’s still someone capable of tenderness, of empathy, of truth. He doesn’t need to suffer for his art. He needs to surrender to it. Jared Leto once said, “I like to push things to the edge.” The problem is, he never learned when to pull back. He’s spent so long building the myth of Jared Leto — the method god, the shapeshifter, the misunderstood genius — that he’s forgotten what made people care in the first place.

He could still be great. But greatness requires humility. And humility is the one character Jared Leto has never managed to play. Until then, he’ll keep delivering performances like performance art, like endurance tests for the audience’s patience. And we’ll keep watching, partly out of curiosity, partly out of disbelief — wondering if this will be the time he finally gets out of his own damn way. But until he does, we’re not watching Jared Leto the actor. We’re watching Jared Leto, the brand — an Oscar-winning performance trapped in a feedback loop of self-parody. It’s not method acting anymore. It’s myth acting. And the myth’s getting old.