Jared Leto took method acting to a new level on the set of Morbius, director Daniel Espinosa says.
Espinosa told MovieMaker that the actor, who plays Dr. Michael Morbius in the new Marvel movie, would walk around the set as “a fully disabled person” before the cameras even started rolling, behaving as if he had the same physical ailments as his character.
“When he walks in, he is Michael Morbius,” Espinosa says. “He would often play Michael Morbius prior to him becoming Morbius, so he would always come in, you know, as a fully disabled person. It would take him like 20 minutes to come to the front of the camera, because it was so hard [to walk]. This would also create pains in his body, to twist himself like that. But it was for him to remember the pain that the character had.”
Espinosa also notes that Leto lost weight to play Morbius at his weakest — the character suffers from a rare blood disease before attempting to create a cure, which turns him into a vampire creature. Then, to play the version of his character with superpowers, Leto gained the weight back — in muscle.
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“That’s dedication,” Espinosa says. “That’s what you get from Jared.”
Leto is known for the intensity of his commitment: His clownish turn as Paolo Gucci in last year’s House of Gucci drew a mix of praise and shock. (A viral tweet by filmmaker Adam Piron opined, “Don’t know how else to describe Jared Leto’s performance in HOUSE OF GUCCI other than the first case of a white actor performing in whiteface.”) But he won an Oscar in 2014 for his Dallas Buyers Club performance as a trans woman, despite criticisms that a cis man shouldn’t have played the role.
Espinosa says he feels a great sense of kinship with actors, which he attributes to working with so many first-timers on his early films.
“With amateurs, you have to adapt to every single person. I’m close and intense, and also I have a great love for actors. I appreciate them,” he says. “I love the craft and I love their dedication. I always feel like they’re suicide bombers that explore their emotions, and we are the guys that are dressed in black, hiding and waiting for them to explode. And when they’ve done that, we have to appreciate that. We have to appreciate the sacrifice that they do.”
Morbius is now playing in U.S. theaters.
Main Image: Jared Leto and Daniel Espinosa on the set of Morbius. Photo by Jay Maidment.
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