Jared Joseph Leto ( LET-oh; born December 26, 1971) is an American actor and musician. Known for his method acting in a variety of roles, he has received various accolades over a career spanning three decades, including an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. He is also the frontman of the rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars.
After beginning his career on the television series My So-Called Life (1994), Leto made his film debut in How to Make an American Quilt (1995) and gained critical attention for his performance in Prefontaine (1997). After supporting roles in The Thin Red Line (1998), Fight Club (1999), Girl, Interrupted (1999) and American Psycho (2000), he received praise for his lead role as a drug addict in Requiem for a Dream (2000). He then began to focus more on music, but returned to acting with Panic Room (2002), Alexander (2004), Lord of War (2005), Chapter 27 (2007), and Mr. Nobody (2009). His performance as a transgender woman in Dallas Buyers Club (2013) won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He has since starred in Suicide Squad (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), The Little Things (2021), House of Gucci (2021), Morbius (2022), Tron: Ares (2025), and Masters of the Universe (2026).
Leto is the lead vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and main songwriter for Thirty Seconds to Mars, a band he formed in 1998 with his older brother Shannon Leto. Its debut album, 30 Seconds to Mars (2002), was released to positive reviews but to limited commercial success. Its second album, A Beautiful Lie (2005), pushed the band into the public eye, and the next releases, This Is War (2009) and Love, Lust, Faith and Dreams (2013), received further critical and commercial success. They were followed by America (2018) and It's the End of the World but It's a Beautiful Day (2023), both of which polarized critics upon release. The band has sold over 15 million albums worldwide.
Jared Joseph Leto was born on December 26, 1971, in Bossier City, Louisiana, to Constance Leto (née Metrejon). His mother has Cajun ancestry. Leto is his stepfather's surname. His parents divorced when he was a child, and he and his older brother, Shannon, lived with their mother and their maternal grandparents, Ruby (Russell) and William Lee Metrejon. After he remarried, his father died by suicide when Jared was eight. Leto moved frequently with his family from Louisiana to different cities around the country. "My mom's father was in the Air Force," Leto has explained, "so moving around a lot was a normal way of life." Leto has two younger half-brothers from his father's second marriage.
Constance joined the hippie movement and encouraged her sons to get involved in the arts. Leto said he "was raised around a lot of artists, musicians, photographers, painters and people that were in theater," adding that "Just having the art communal hippie experience as a child, there wasn't a clear line that was drawn. We celebrated creative experience and creative expression. We didn't try and curtail it and stunt any of that kind of growth." Leto started playing music with his brother at an early age; his first musical instrument was a broken-down piano.
After dropping out briefly in the 10th grade, Leto decided to return and focus on his education at the private Emerson Preparatory School in Washington, D.C. He was interested in large-scale visual art and enrolled at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. After developing an interest in filmmaking, he transferred to the School of Visual Arts in New York City. While he was a student there, he wrote and starred in his own short film, Crying Joy. He also attended the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, now a part of George Washington University.
1992–1999: Early acting roles, Prefontaine and Thirty Seconds to Mars
In 1992, Leto moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. The same year, Leto made his television film debut starring alongside Alicia Silverstone in Cool and the Crazy, and landed his first film role in the 1995 drama How to Make an American Quilt. He later co-starred with Christina Ricci in The Last of the High Kings (1996) and got a supporting role in Switchback (1997).
In 1997, Leto starred in the biopic Prefontaine as Olympic hopeful Steve Prefontaine. To prepare for the role, Leto immersed himself in the runner's life, training for six weeks and meeting with members of his family and friends. He bore a striking resemblance to the real Prefontaine, also adopting the athlete's voice and upright running style. His portrayal received positive reviews from critics and is often considered his breakthrough role. Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle noted: "With hypnotic blue eyes and dirty blond hair, Leto captures the rock-star style Prefontaine affected, and he looks natural in fiery performances on the track, as well as off, where Pre affected a brash, confrontational style."
After landing the lead role of a British aristocrat in the 1998 drama Basil, Leto starred in the horror Urban Legend. It was poorly received by most critics, but was a financial success. That year, Terrence Malick cast Leto for a supporting role in the war film The Thin Red Line alongside Sean Penn and Adrien Brody. It garnered mostly positive reviews and was a moderate success. It received multiple awards and nominations, including seven Academy Award nominations; Leto shared a Satellite Award with the rest of the cast.
Leto formed the rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars in 1998 in Los Angeles, California with his brother Shannon. When the group first started, Jared Leto did not allow his position of Hollywood actor to be used in promotion of the band. Their debut album had been in the works for a couple of years, with Leto writing the majority of the songs. Their work led to a number of record labels being interested in signing Thirty Seconds to Mars, which eventually signed to Immortal Records.
In 1999, Leto played a gay high school teacher who attracts the attention of Robert Downey, Jr.'s character in Black and White, and had a supporting role in the drama Girl, Interrupted, an adaptation of the memoir of the same name by Susanna Kaysen. He then portrayed Angel Face in Fight Club (1999), a film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel of the same name, directed by David Fincher.
2000–2005: Requiem for a Dream, other roles, Panic Room and A Beautiful Lie
Leto played Paul Allen, a rival of Patrick Bateman, in the psychological thriller American Psycho (2000). Though the film polarized audiences and critics, Leto's performance was well received. The same year, he starred as heroin addict Harry Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream, an adaptation of Hubert Selby, Jr.'s novel of the same name, directed by Darren Aronofsky and co-starring Ellen Burstyn, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans. To prepare for his role, Leto lived on the streets of New York City and refrained from having sex for two months prior to shooting. He starved himself for months, losing 28 pounds to realistically play his heroin addict character. After the shooting of the film, Leto moved to Portugal and lived in a monastery for several months to gain weight. His performance received critical acclaim by film critics who notably praised the actor's emotional courage in portraying the character's physical and mental degradation. Peter Travers from Rolling Stone commented that Leto "excels by going beyond Harry's gaunt look to capture his grieving heart. His scenes with Ellen Burstyn as Sara, Harry's widowed mother, achieve a rare poignancy as son and mother drown in delusions."
Leto next appeared in the independent film Highway. Set in 1994, Jack Hayes (Leto) is caught with the wife of his employer, a Vegas thug, and flees to Seattle with his best friend, Pilot Kelvin (Jake Gyllenhaal), in the week preceding Kurt Cobain's suicide. Filming finished in early 2000, but the film was not released until March 2002 on home video formats, although originally scheduled for a theatrical release.
During this period Leto focused increasingly on his music career, working with producers Bob Ezrin and Brian Virtue on his band's debut album 30 Seconds to Mars, which was released on August 27, 2002, in the United States through Immortal and Virgin. It reached number 107 on the US Billboard 200 and number one on the US Top Heatseekers. Upon its release, 30 Seconds to Mars was met with mostly positive reviews; music critic Megan O'Toole felt that the band managed to "carve out a unique niche for themselves in the rock realm." The album was a slow-burning success, and eventually sold two million copies worldwide.