“EVERY MORNING I DRINK A GALLON OF SALT WATER. SAY THAT IN THE ARTICLE,” JARED LETO SAYS. “AND THEN EVERYONE’S GONNA DRINK A GALLON OF SALT WATER IN THE MORNING, WHICH UNFORTUNATELY WILL MAKE PEOPLE SHIT THEIR PANTS.”
He doesn’t, and you shouldn’t. Leto, allegedly 50, won’t share why he looks so young. “I do have a good answer for that, but I probably won’t tell you,” he says, noting that genetics surely plays a role—his mother has always looked young and healthy. “Just to keep everybody guessing. Really, honestly, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter.”
It does matter to a certain writer, who spends a significant sum on injectables each year and who is currently mystified by the face before her. It’s challenging to write about a celebrity’s skin without evoking The Silence of the Lambs, but Leto’s face is healthy looking and apparently lineless. It would be hyperbolic to say it’s the skin of Jordan Catalano, the teen heartthrob he played on My So-Called Life in 1994, but it’s at least the skin of a 30-year-old who wears hats all the time.
Actually, Leto does seem to appreciate a good hat. In the fivepart climbing docuseries he made in 2016, Great Wide Open, he often has a big straw number dangling from a strap around his neck, like a maiden in a meadow in a strong breeze. Maybe everyone was right about sun protection.
Another theory about his youthful visage: Leto doesn’t emote very much in casual conversation. He’s certainly capable of flamboyant expression, as when he played Paolo Gucci in last year’s . In that film, Leto has a significant Hitchcockian forehead and brow as well as a prosthetic nose and jowls, deployed to great effect. The juxtaposition of that character’s showiness and the actor’s stillness is jarring, like watching a famous comedian give a somber eulogy.
