When Jared Leto Gaslit A Reporter (About An Awful Movie)
Sure we love making fun of Jared Leto from time to time, but today … well, today is no different, actually. We’ve already discussed how Leto didn’t hear about a deadly global pandemic because he was meditating in the desert for 12 days, how he ate ice cream and soy sauce soup to gain enough weight to play the jerk who murdered John Lennon in a movie nobody saw, and of course, how taking a gig playing an iconic comic book supervillain led to him to reportedly send loose condoms and dead animals to his unimpressed co-workers. But there’s one notably weird Leto anecdote we haven’t mentioned so far.
Back in 1998, Leto starred in a little movie called Urban Legend, a Scream facsimile about a group of college students (who for some reason are all in their late twenties) targeted by an ax-wielding maniac who dresses in a parka despite the fact that it is clearly summertime.
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And hey, it’s not a great movie, but it’s also not “lie through your teeth and pretend it doesn’t exist” bad. But that’s just what Leto did in 2002. During an interview with IGN, which even to this day pops up on social media occasionally, the interviewer asked Leto about his work in Urban Legend, to which Leto replied: “What’s that?” Leto continues to laugh and be generally evasive, adding “I don’t even remember that,” and “I don’t even know what you’re talkin’ about, dude.”
Leto may have been joking around, but weirdly he never relents, insisting that he had never ever heard of the movie that features his face on the poster. And sure, he’d perhaps moved on from dumb horror movies to classier fare at that point in his career, appearing in films like Requiem For a Dream, American Psycho, and Home Alone For Grown-Ups, AKA Panic Room. But it still seems like an insane tactic to take. Like, Kevin Bacon is happy to talk about Friday the 13th. And if it comes up in conversation, Jennifer Aniston won’t gaslight you into thinking that Leprechaun must have just been a dream you had once.
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Top Image: Sony Pictures
