“Honeydew melon is the worst thing about everything it’s in, like Jared Leto,” goes a particularly great joke in the new season of “BoJack Horseman,” which hit Netflix today. This isn’t entirely fair: Leto has been good in films like “Requiem For A Dream” and “Panic Room.” But increasingly, his method commitment to movies like “Suicide Squad” has seemed increasingly try-hard, and that looks to be continuing into his big fall movie, “Blade Runner 2049.”
The long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic sees Leto playNiander Wallace, the blind villain of the piece, and according to a new profile of Leto in the Wall Street Journal, his overly-literal approach to acting continued, with the actor spending the shoot wearing contact lenses that made him essentially unable to see.
And the film’s director Denis Villeneuve uses some very particular phrasing that will probably only feed Leto’s ego a little more. “We all heard stories about Jared, how he transforms into the characters, but even this didn’t prepare me for what was to come,” the director said, of Leto’s first camera test. “He could not see at all. He was walking with an assistant, very slowly. It was like seeing Jesus walking into a temple. Everybody became super silent, and there was a kind of sacred moment. Everyone was in awe. It was so beautiful and powerful — I was moved to tears.”
Maybe we’re jumping unfairly to conclusions, but Harrison Ford’s reaction would have been quite different if he’d been on set at that moment… Anyway, Leto says that he was less method in this role than some of his others — “I didn’t dive as deep down the rabbit hole as maybe I’ve done before” — suggesting that if he had his time again, he would have tried to create a robot Dave Bautista or tried to actually kill Ryan Gosling or something.
Despite all of that, the 160 minute running time and the slight whiff of “Tron: Legacy” about the whole affair, we’re still absolutely psyched to see “Blade Runner 2049,” Leto and all. The film’s now less than a month away, and will open on October 6th.