Jared Leto

Jared Leto is an American actor and rock musician whose three-decade career has produced two parallel creative tracks — major Hollywood film roles (including the 2014 Best Supporting Actor Oscar) and his fronting of the Los Angeles rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars. He was born Jared Joseph Leto on December 26, 1971, in Bossier City, Louisiana. He attended several different American high schools as his family moved frequently, and he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and at the Philadelphia College of Art before pivoting to acting.

His role came in 1994 as Jordan Catalano on the ABC teen drama My So-Called Life (1994–1995, opposite Claire Danes). Although the show was canceled after only 19 episodes, Leto's Jordan Catalano became one of the most-iconic American teen-TV heartthrob characters of the mid-1990s. His film career through the late 1990s and 2000s produced multiple substantial roles: How to Make an American Quilt (1995), Prefontaine (1997), Fight Club (1999), David Fincher's Panic Room (2002), Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream (2000), and the 2007 thriller Chapter 27 (where he gained 67 pounds to play Mark David Chapman, John Lennon's killer).

His Oscar came in 2014 for Best Supporting Actor in Jean-Marc Vallée's Dallas Buyers Club, where his performance as the transgender AIDS patient Rayon — for which he reportedly lost over 30 pounds and lived in character throughout filming — became one of the American screen-acting transformative performances of the 2010s. His subsequent major roles have included Suicide Squad (2016, where he played the Joker — a performance that drew significant cultural debate), Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and Ridley Scott's House of Gucci (2021).

His parallel band Thirty Seconds to Mars — co-founded with his older brother Shannon Leto in 1998 — has released six studio albums and toured extensively internationally. The band's 2009 single "Kings and Queens" and 2013's single "Up in the Air" became late-2000s and 2010s American alternative-rock hits. He has continued to balance acting and music into his fifties.

His name Jared is from the Hebrew Yared meaning "descending" — referring to the Old Testament patriarch Jared, father of Enoch. Jared has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for decades.