Jared Leto's 'Suicide Squad' Antics Are Douchebaggery, Not Method Acting

There's an oft-repeated, apparently apocryphal tale about famed actor Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, his young co-star in 1976 film Marathon Man, that has, true or not, long encapsulated the madness with which some thespians ply themselves to roles when making movies.

The story goes that Olivier, casting his eyes upon a haggard-looking, legitimately unkempt Hoffman — who had allegedly spent the previous several days awake in order to properly convey his character's pain and confusion at also having been conscious for days — quipped, "Dear boy, it's called acting — you should try it."

Despite Olivier's well-documented distaste for method acting ("What method? I thought each of us had our own method!" he once said), the practise remains a wildly popular one among actors looking to make their mark on the silver screen.

Leonardo DiCaprio, for example, is a great contemporary example of this, doing ridiculous things to himself like eating raw bison liver and sleeping in animal carcasses to capture the peril and unforgiving wilderness his character experienced in The Revenant. Veteran actor Robert De Niro gained nearly 30 kilograms and learnt how to box for Raging Bull and actually worked as a taxi driver prior to shooting, uh, Taxi Driver. Joaquin Phoenix went totally off the deep end, releasing a mockumentary, I'm Still Here, in 2010, about his retirement from acting to pursue a career in hip hop, for which he didn't break character during the entire shoot.

And then there's Jared Leto.

The major point of difference between Leto's 'method acting' and the examples listed above is primarily that, in each of those cases, the person who suffered for the art was the actor. When Christian Bale went from The Machinist to Batman Begins, the extreme weight changes undergone by his body were experienced by Bale and Bale alone. Sure, the crew might have had to put up with related mood swings or something, but ultimately the man being punished for his commitment to the craft was Bale himself. Even Heath Ledger's experience embodying the Joker in 2008's The Dark Knight famously took a toll on the late Aussie actor — not his co-workers — as he tried to delve deeply into the mind of one of comics literature's best-known but least-understood characters.

And then… there's Jared Leto.

In stark contrast, the 30 Seconds To Mars frontman has, in his process of assuming the role of The Joker for David Ayer's upcoming feature Suicide Squad, engaged in all manner of lunacy that, yes, could be explained away as just being part of the journey into The Joker's mind, but by the same token it seems strange the the only people to have been remotely inconvenienced or concerned by any of his attempts to more fully understand the Clown Prince Of Crime are his co-workers, rather than the actor himself.

Let's be clear: sending used condoms to your peers isn't funny. It's creepy. The Joker wouldn't even think it was that funny, honestly. It's the sort of thing that frat boys who think they understand The Joker would find funny, but that's about it.

Seriously, how did that achieve anything positive towards the ultimate characterisation of The Joker? Along with being a misguided pastiche of '90s Cuban gang lords, is this Joker also a sex pest? Yes, the villain is renowned for being an acolyte of chaos for chaos' sake — and very occasionally, in seven decades of publication, has been implicated in a violent sexual crime — but he's also not exactly prone to routinely jacking off into a rubber and mailing it to the Batcave for kicks, either.

It's not just the condoms (and anal beads) that set Leto's 'method' apart as being peculiarly more mean-spirited than the usual fare, however. According to co-star Will Smith, Leto didn't even introduce himself to the veteran actor once during production. He only ever met "The Joker". That's not method; that's just plain rude. Sure, it's not unprecedented — some actors are renowned for being closed-off and emotionally volatile — but it's so unnecessary. You can prattle on about "believability" and "realism" all you want; I just don't see the need to send someone a vial of bodily fluids to better understand how they might react to that event (hint: it probably won't be positively), much less use that as a shoddy means to understand a character's motivations.

A live rat (for Margot Robbie), a dead pig (for everyone), a "sticky" Playboy magazine (for Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje); all of it was designed to make other people uncomfortable, which isn't really the point of the form at all.

To be totally fair to Leto, it doesn't seem like his co-stars were too put out by it all — it's not like they ran out to take out restraining orders or campaign to have him removed from the film or anything. But, even if any of this was in line with how The Joker acts, you wouldn't think it's supposed to be about embodying your character through the process of simply annoying everyone around you to death. Shit, Shia LaBeouf is one of the most notorious method actors around, and the worst he ever inflicted on his co-stars was B.O. from hell while filming war flick Fury, with Ayer and Brad Pitt. 

At the end of the day, if Suicide Squad is a success for Warner Bros, none of this will matter; people will champion Leto's "brilliance" and "dedication"; the "terrifying" air surrounding his Joker; this "visionary", new-age interpretation sure to leave Ledger loyalists lost for words. Leto's co-stars will shrug off his weird, erratic behaviour because it helped make a cinematic gem, and they will enthusiastically and publicly look forward to the next time they have the opportunity to receive a jug of human teeth or a pubic-hair recreation of the Mona Lisa from the man, and I'll be here looking like an over-reactive wuss who can't handle a splash of everyday unidentified semen in my gifts.

But that's fine; even if all early indications are wrong, and Leto ends up being the best damn Joker in history... even then, it still won't change the fact that he went to extreme lengths to ensure that he was taking the absolute shittiest road possible to get where he wanted to be, and, in light of that, it's pretty damn hard to find a way (or want to find a way) to reconcile why that sort of behaviour — or 'method', if we're really committed to that — should be something to encourage or celebrate.

Suicide Squad will be released in Australian cinemas on Thursday, 4 August.