January 27, 2025

Is that you, Jared Leto? The actor is unrecognizable in ‘House of Gucci’ movie poster

Jared Leto #JaredLeto

Jared Leto is seen wearing Gucci in 2019. (Photo: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for LACMA)

Jared Leto, the Oscar-winning actor known for transforming himself for roles — including the wild Joker in Suicide Squad, hefty John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman in Chapter 27 and the emaciated HIV-positive Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club — now has yet another look.

This time it’s for House of Gucci, director Ridley Scott’s telling of how Patrizia Reggiani (played by Lady Gaga) plotted to kill her ex-husband, Maurizio Gucci (played by Adam Driver), the grandson of fashion designer Guccio Gucci. Leto plays Paolo Gucci, the cousin of Maurizio. Salma Hayek, Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons co-star in the crime drama.

In an October 1995 obituary for the man Leto portrays, the Washington Post called him “a key player in the struggle for control of the fashion dynasty started in Florence in 1906 by his grandfather.” By the time he died of chronic hepatitis, Paolo Gucci had been fired from his family empire and had attempted to go out on his own as a designer.

While Leto has changed his look often over the years, this time it rendered him almost unrecognizable, so it took many by surprise. People couldn’t get over the added weight and years. (Leto is 49, but he looked decades older.)

Leto, who’s a noted fan of Gucci fashions and has pitched them in ads, told ET Canada in May that the job required “about five hours of prosthetics every morning.”

As for filling out or dropping weight for a role, Leto has mixed feelings.

“It can be an incredibly rewarding, but also destructive, thing to do,” he told E! in February 2015. “Your body changes forever”

In fact, Leto said that he advises his fellow actors not to do what he does.

“I always try to talk people out of it,” he said.

Leave a Reply