Jared Leto’s pastoral approach as an artist — drifting between characters, forms, identities, and stories — likely started when he was a child. Per The Telegraph, the actor and musician lived “a nomad’s life” with his mom and brother Shannon Leto, where they “moved around a lot,” making temporary homes “everywhere from Wyoming to Virginia to Colorado, even South America.”
As underlined by his emotional 2014 Oscar speech, the star grew up poor but happy, and once affectionately joked that his mom essentially carried him and his brother “in one hand and a fistful of food stamps in the other” to Interview. Casting a further potential shadow on his childhood was an absentee father, who Newshub reported as having walked out on the family soon after Jared was born. When the actor was eight, his father died of suicide.
Luckily, Jared and his brother were raised in an artistic atmosphere among their mom’s extensive art friends who encouraged the two kids to feel, as Shannon put it in Rolling Stone, “no boundaries” in regards to expressing their creativity. Clearly, it paid off. It may also go some way as to explaining Jared’s propensity to get creative with his own story. The actor confessed to Rolling Stone that, on occasion, he’d been willfully deceptive regarding details of his childhood. “I lied about it so much, I don’t know what the truth is,” he said, noting that he was inspired by River Phoenix’s approach to lying “as much as possible” in interviews.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
