It can be an odd sort of curse nail your quintessential role right out of the gate. And even weirder when everyone pretends that’s not what happened. That seems to be the unfortunate case for Jared Leto, who came to prominence as Jordan Catalano, the enigmatic crush object of Angela Chase (Claire Danes) on ABC’s My So-Called Life. The teen drama ran just a single season in the mid-’90s, but the show’s long tail in reruns (and being just plain great) meant that several of its stars were quickly shuttled over to the big screen. Soon Leto was making several movies a year, as if filmmakers and executives had heeded the observation made by one of My So-Called Life’s romantically analytical teen girls: “He leans great.”
Leto doesn’t do a lot of leaning in Tron: Ares, his latest starring vehicle. Even his trademark Catalano-style brooding feels distinctly lite; as Ares, the film’s digital-warrior title character who undergoes a Terminator-to-Terminator 2 arc in the space of a barely-two-hour movie, Leto tries his hand at synthetic perfection giving way to light-touch humanity. Audiences have responded much the same way they did to his similarly humanity-transcending role in the Sony Marvel offshoot Morbius: Somewhere between polite refusal and active rejection. Tron: Ares is on course to make a similar amount as Morbius at the box office, and help kill another franchise in the process.
To be fair to Leto, audiences have never seemed particularly wild about Tron as a concept. The biggest of the series’ three cinematic entries came out in 2010, at which point Disney failed to capitalize on whatever interest there was in a sequel. They waited 15 years, with Leto apparently leading the way in terms of getting the thing made. And to be fair to Tron, its star-producer seems to have no idea how wrong he is for this role, even if there weren’t reports of Leto engaging in sexual misconduct. In fact – again, setting aside the allegations that at another time might have killed his career on their own – it’s arguable that Leto hasn’t ever really been right for a leading-man part.
Even Jordan Catalano isn’t really the male lead of My So-Called Life, per se. He’s most effective in his scarcity and his opacity; he’s someone who Angela doesn’t know that well, and when she does learn more about him, it’s not especially flattering. (They break up at one point because she doesn’t want to have sex at 15.) Leto balances the bad-boy sensitivity with genuine, well, badness almost unnervingly well, so it makes sense that when he started breaking into movies, a lot of filmmakers seemed to have the impulse to beat the ever-loving shit out of him.
“I wanted to destroy something beautiful,” the Narrator (Edward Norton) explains after he jealously pummels Leto’s character in Fight Club, possibly disfiguring him. He wasn’t the only one; director David Fincher would go on to shoot Leto’s character in the face in Panic Room. In between those two Fincher movies, Darren Aronofsky put Leto through the wringer in Requiem for a Dream, which ends with his character’s arm being amputated after heroin use turns it gangrenous, and Mary Harron cast Leto as the guy Patrick Bateman kills with an axe to the face in American Psycho. Both of those movies came out in the same year.
Those are also, perhaps not coincidentally, the four best movies Leto has ever appeared in. After tooling around in a series of forgettable films where he was not beaten or mutilated at all, Leto re-emerged ready to win that Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club, playing a trans woman with AIDS in the 1980s. In 2025, it’s difficult to picture any straight dude, especially Leto, collecting an armful of awards for “bravely” playing a trans woman, but Leto got in just under the wire. He proceeded with a pivot to eccentric franchise character actor, shamelessly imitating Heath Ledger for a superficially more gangsta version of the Joker in Suicide Squad, appearing briefly in Blade Runner 2049, and playing a possible serial killer opposite Denzel Washington in The Little Things.
It would be a stretch to call Leto “good” in any of these roles. Merely calling him “bad” in Suicide Squad would be compliment enough. But they do at least show some understanding of his ill-suitedness to play a traditionally heroic male lead (though his imitation-Method on-set antics seemed to erase any sense of self-awareness). Tron: Ares casts him as a Keanu Reeves type, and it’s not even as fun as a disaster; it’s nothing. Just a stunt-doubled poof of digital dust in a role that could have been a fun showcase for a better actor or shinier movie star. Leto’s post-Oscar career has mostly felt like a shell game, a mutual delusion that because he got that Supporting Actor trophy, he should be able to command more money, help open a movie, activate a following of fans. But as Angela Chase learned, leaning great doesn’t always indicate great depth beneath the surface, and Leto’s well-preserved beauty only looks more diffuse and hollow with time.
His greatest role of the past couple of decades plays against that quality, but not in the quasi-edgelord way he tries to affect as the Joker. No, his supporting triumph of recent years is in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, where he plays Paolo, a bumbling and unlikable failson with delusions of artistic talent. Here, at least, is the self-awareness he seemed to be chasing in other, more flattering roles. If there’s a path forward for Leto now that he’s more or less proved he can’t carry a franchise film, that seems like the only possible move, short of leaving well enough alone and retiring: leaning in another direction, into his less flattering, more punchable qualities.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
