The day I spent with Jared Leto

It is April 2007, I am 30 years old and have been sent by The Times newspaper to spend the day with Jared Leto. Not for his acting, which is good, but for his rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars, which is dreadful. Thankfully I have not been asked to review them, so I won’t quite have to say that part out loud. This is a feature, meaning I will interview him to ask why he’s so passionate about making scuzzy emo rock when he could just stick to Hollywood, having already got so big from his starring role as Jordan Catalano on the cult teen series My So-Called Life, and another mesmerising lead role in the film Requiem for a Dream.

I will watch Jared Leto as he rehearses with his bandmates at The Astoria, a concert venue in London which has since closed down. I will write observations in my notepad as he hangs out in the dressing room, prepares for the show, plays the show, does a meet and greet with the fans, gets drinks afterwards (though he doesn’t drink them). I will get colour. I will pick up on vibes. I will describe the way the fans obsess over him.

I will end up with one single red rose that Jared has put in my hand to take home, and the buttons on my blouse will come undone when I’m alone with Jared in a backstage room that I remember as the size of a cupboard. Where we had to go so my dictaphone would pick up on his words better. Get us away from all the noise or everybody else. At least, I think that was the reason given at the time. By him? By me?

I will publish this feature in the arts section of The Times in May 2007, and Leto’s representative will get in touch to ask for a print copy to be sent to him as he liked it so much, and it will come so close to figuring out the relationship between Leto and his young fans and yet it will fall so very short and - right now I would just like to say sorry. I have been around so many of these monstrous men in my work. I have experienced them differently from the fans as they work me for their own publicity needs.

I tried, in the piece, which I have pasted in italics at the very end of this page (it’s the un-subbed copy I just found in my emails so might be slightly different from what went to print) to understand the dynamic between Leto and his fans. Unfortunately it seems that, despite having a mother who worked as an expert in the field of sexual abuse, I was still naive about celebrities.

There’s a reason I rarely interview famous men any more.

What I vividly remember is that Leto had a stronger dose of star quality, of what we used to call the X factor, than any celebrity I’ve ever met. Vibrating at a higher frequency than anyone else in the room. Buzzing. Glowing. Charming.

This is definitely a quality that you can work on and develop, though the intense light blue colour of his big wide eyes seemed to be God-given. I wondered if his eyes had set him down this path, if he had found out at a young age that his eyes had an effect on people, and wondered what else he could do to cultivate that sort of power.

When I saw him with his fans, working the room, it felt like he had an almost demonic intensity. When his eyes fixed on you something happened. I saw a fan who had somehow earned a private meet-and-greet with him - though I was in the room too - hand him a red rose she had brought him. She told him she had picked off every thorn by hand, so it didn’t hurt him. I watched him look into her eyes and thank her with the most genuine, heartfelt, moving exchange. Did he embrace her? Probably.

This rose ceremony seemed a moment of romantic intensity that would stay with her for the rest of her life - and then the nanosecond that his security ushered her out of the room, he turned to me with a big grin, handed me this most precious of things and said in a cheesily American way, “Regifting the gift!” Of course he didn’t want the stupid rose. This is all part of the performance of fame; of the warped relationship between fan and famous. I took her rose home.

(How often have I introduced a civilian friend to a famous person I’ve been working with, maybe got to know a bit, only for the normal person to frantically tell the famous person that they have some connection, someone they once lived next door to whose brother played in their band, or that they have in fact met this famous before, at an event in a different city, there was this thing, there was this signing…. I will tell you now, the famous person never gives a shit. You are the ten thousandth person to try to tell them about something as boring as this. “No way!” they will say to you, because it’s part of their contract as a known person to make you, just for a minute, feel like one too.)

And so to the the cupboard. There were other people around, a bit noisy for my dictaphone to pick up his answers to my questions, so we went from a backstage room into a smaller room that I presume was some kind of wardrobe with room for two people to stand in it? We were extremely close to one another and I started firing my questions at Jared and he responded and then I asked another one and he said “Easy!’ while looking at my chest. I was confused. I think he said it again when I tried to continue. Maybe he said “Easy tiger!” and I thought this was a weird response to what I had asked.

I couldn’t work out why he was gesturing to my blouse and it felt distinctly uncomfortable to look down at my chest like he was doing, but I looked down and saw that the top three buttons on my blouse had come undone and my bra, my boobs, were now on full show. Hanging out. What the…? I don’t know much about hypnosis but I do know nobody had touched me. My shirt had done this by itself. One button had occasionally come undone before - but three?

I don’t think you need me to tell you how humiliating it is for a professional journalist to have to fasten all her buttons up while conducting an interview for The Times. I had never seen My So-Called Life, I found the band embarrassing and I had zero desire towards Jared Leto. I still don’t understand how it happened.

There is one particular paragraph I wrote in the piece that - oof.

Coolness is an interesting point, because the odd thing about Jared Leto’s musical project is that it is not perhaps as cool as Jared Leto. The music has now found genre fellowship with emo bands such as My Chemical Romance, but as Jared points out, 30 Seconds to Mars have been going for far longer, and have always been “the odd men out.” Their fans are not particularly glamorous; they seem to find solace in each other, in friendships largely struck up through the internet, that they cannot find elsewhere. Why would a man who can date Scarlett Johansson want to connect with these people so much?

I can now tell you it’s for exactly the reason that they are not Scarlett Johansson. They are more susceptible. More in awe of him. An easier hit, an easier silence. Nobodies. Vulnerable. His power. Unquestioned power. A dynamic tipped almost entirely in his favour. And all the other things that makes a grown man want to do that to a child with acne who has saved up all her money to travel over from Belgium to see her hero. One of the victims quoted in the BBC report says that Leto asked her to call him Daddy.

A friend of mine was recently preparing her daughter for secondary school, which would involve a commute on the overground train in London. She really wanted to warn her about dodgy men who would be interested in a girl in school uniform alone on public transport. “I do get it about dodgy men, I really do understand, Mum,” said her daughter, “but they wouldn’t be interested in a 12-year-old girl!” It broke my friend’s heart to have to be the one to tell her that no, that’s exactly who they’d be interested in.

When Chomsky coined the phrase ‘manufacturing consent’ he meant political propaganda, but I think of it with celebrities too. The interview that humanises the monster, makes a parent reading it think it might be ok, even exciting, for their child to meet this person. And that makes it all the harder for that child to then speak out, because look at all the institutions who trusted him, all the journalists like Sophie Heawood who spoke well of him. And then I feel sick again.

By Sophie Heawood

Scientists trying to capture the essence of sex appeal might like to experiment on Jared Leto, since his is contagious - after spending a day in his company, I’ve got women falling at my feet too. Sadly, a team of paramedics rush in and ruin my moment of glory, as it transpires the 19-year-old Spanish woman who just plunged onto my shoes has in fact fainted. A devoted fan of Leto’s band, 30 Seconds to Mars, she has just watched their show at London’s Astoria, and the thrill of the big moment has proved all too much for her.

Or perhaps it’s the fact that her pre-lapsarian self had queued from 7am to 7pm today to be the first in front of the stage, having already seen four of their shows in a row after saving up every last Euro to follow the band around the UK with other Spanish obsessives whom she met on the band’s internet fan sites. The ten-strong Belgian contingency I speak to have done likewise - and these are just two nations within ‘The Echelon’, as devotees of the punk rock band 30 Seconds to Mars are known.

“A giant dysfunctional family,” is how Leto proudly describes them, tucked into a grotty dressing room with his band before the show. He explains in some depth what an unusually strong relationship they have with their audience. “The word fan does come from fanatic”, points out a grinning Shannon Leto, Jared’s brother and the band’s drummer. But these fans are beyond fanatic. These fans are mad.

They will say it's because they love the pomp and circumstance of the shows so much, full of jumping and strutting and power singing, or that they identify with the message of the songs, but clearly, the secret lies with Jared Leto. Better-known as an actor, he rose to fame in the cult teenage drama series My So-Called Life, going on to act in films including Fight Club, Requiem for a Dream and Alexander. Often to be found in the gossip columns of celebrity magazines, his little-boy-lost eyes and all-American charm have seen him romantically linked with Cameron Diaz, Scarlet Johansson and Lindsay Lohan. When you meet him, it's those cerulean orbs that strike you first, though the faultless manners come swiftly afterwards, as do those of his bandmates. It's hard to imagine a British band allocating so much of their budget to charm school.

No wonder well-wishers would hurl money at Jared as a teenager busking on the streets of New York, after he escaped from a not altogether happy childhood, in which he and Shannon moved all over the US. (Shannon claims to still be broke, and is gob-smacked when I suggest he must live a Hollywood lifestyle - he says he has driven the same
car since 1998.) And to the streets of New York Jared recently returned, to play the role of Mark Chapman in a biopic that seeks to humanise the man who killed John Lennon. Yes, Leto plays an obsessive fan who ends up killing his own hero - it's a role you'd think he
might have shied away from (especially as he had to gain nearly five stone to play the overweight loner: microwaved ice-cream apparently helped a lot). But he says he wanted to "investigate the humanity behind the monster."

It only took six weeks though, and then he was back to the two-year long touring duties of the band, who have now sold over a million copies of their second album, A Beautiful Lie, in the US. They were signed in 1988, and initially refused to let Jared's name be mentioned in their publicity or listings, which meant they had to take the long and sweaty route to success. Even now, it's clear that he can't VIP his way out of the hard work. He may have lost all those Chapman pounds, but in life, his punishing schedule means he has to work at not spreading himself too thinly.

On the day I spend with him there's a lengthy soundcheck, which he describes as constant problem-shooting, then interviews, a photoshoot where a make-up artist touches up his nose where it got broken in a crowd stampede at a gig in El Paso, a private audience with a competition-winning fan who gives him a red rose whose thorns she says she has pulled off specially (he later passes it on to me, "regifting the gift"). Then there's a meet-and-greet with record label types who wish to replace the dandruff from their shoulders with a dusting of Leto sparkle, the ludicrously energetic show, and then two whole hours of signing autographs for fans (nobody is ever turned away).

By midnight he is pressing the flesh at the aftershow drinks (though he steers cleer of booze these days), and then, when it starts to get light again, there is the small business of a flight to Australia to do it all again. He also designs the band's artwork and directs their
videos (under a pseudonym), choosing to film them in easily accessible locations such as Beijing's Forbidden City.

Renaissance man he might be, but where does the drive come from? Is it all just another of his acting roles? When it comes to the music, he says no. "On the contrary, I think that when you go on stage, you become more of who you really are. I think it's a side of yourself at the very least." Their band is very stagey though, as he agrees. "Yes, we have a certain element of gregariousness, of theatricality. It's definitely more art rock than it is punk rock. And I think a return to some size and scope in rock and roll is something to celebrate. A little bombast; a little larger than life - we like to explore ideas and not to be constrained by what we think is cool or not cool."

Coolness is an interesting point, because the odd thing about Jared Leto's musical project is that it is not perhaps as cool as Jared Leto. The music has now found genre fellowship with emo bands such as My Chemical Romance, but as Jared points out, 30 Seconds to Mars have been going for far longer, and have always been "the odd men out."Their fans are not particularly glamorous; they seem to find solace in each other, in friendships largely struck up through the internet, that they cannot find elsewhere. Why would a man who can date Scarlett Johansson want to connect with these people so much?

"Because it's nice to listen to people that have made a deep connection with other people through a shared experience. You can't force that to happen, you can't create it. But when you try to give a reason why it's happened you end up sounding - is 'naff' what you say in England?"

The cynic would suggest it's because they offer unconditional devotion, and there is indeed something a little messianic about Leto. As my new friend from Barcelona told me, "This isn't a group, it's a cult!" And then she fell over.