To those who disapprove of the salacious gifts Jared Leto gave his “Suicide Squad” co-stars — said to include used condoms and live rodents — the “House of Gucci” star has a message for you.
“I’m an artist at the end of the day,” Leto said. “If I do something risky and you don’t like it, basically, you can kiss my ass.”
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the Oscar-winner addressed comments he made at the DC film’s 2016 red carpet premiere. There, he told a reporter that he gifted “anal beads” and “used condoms” to “everybody” on the set in order to “create a dynamic” and “an element of surprise” that would “break down any kind of walls that may be there.”
“The Joker is somebody who doesn’t really respect things like personal space or boundaries,” he explained.
Leto told EW that most of those statements were made “in jest,” adding that “99.9 percent of what people read is bulls—-.”
Specifically, he cleared the air about what he’d given to Margot Robbie, who played Harley Quinn in the film. “The only gifts I ever gave Margot were cupcakes, I think I gave her a mouse, and some of the other guys got gifts that you’d get as a joke at a party,” he said. “It was us just goofing around.”
At the “Suicide Squad” premiere, his co-stars Margot Robbie and Will Smith confirmed and elaborated on Leto’s disturbing gifts.
“Jared went full Joker,” Smith said. “The rule, generally, is never go full Joker, but he really set the tone. He wasn’t playing with it, he was dead serious. As an actor, he was going in… he really jarred [us].”
As for Robbie, who played Harley Quinn, the actress “can’t even begin to tell you the things I got [from Jared]…” Later, she told Elle that she kept a rodent Leto had given her, which her co-star Viola Davis described as a “black rat” in a separate interview.
“It was still alive in a box,” Davis said in a Vanity Fair interview in 2016. “She screamed and then she kept it.”
She revealed that Leto consistently showed up with “horrifying” gifts throughout the shoot. “He had a henchman who would come into the rehearsal room, and the henchman came in with a dead pig and plopped it on the table, and then he walked out.”
Now, Leto says his peculiar bonding techniques were all in good fun. “Any of the very few gifts that were ever given were given with a spirit of fun and adventure and received with laughter, fun, and adventure,” he told EW. “It’s all filmed! They filmed it all! People were dying.”
“I’m playing a guy called the Joker, it’s OK to play some jokes,” he continued. “Nothing ever crossed any lines, and it’s not up to other people on the internet to create those lines.”