Jared Leto ain’t joking around.
The Academy Award-winning actor’s next project has been revealed as an Andy Warhol biopic, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Along with starring as the lead, Leto is also slated to produce the currently-untitled biopic alongside producer Michael De Luca (The Social Network, Captain Phillips) from a screenplay by Terrence Winter (The Wolf of Wall Street).
For those of you that are unfamiliar, Andy Warhol is a notable artist from the 1960’s who pioneered the pop art movement. An innovator in areas of impressionistic and satirical craftsmanship, Warhol created art through all sorts of mediums, including illustrations, paintings, prints, photographs, silk screens, sculptures, music, and even films (although his short Mario Banana is one of the most mortifying things I’ve seen to date). Warhol was also one of the first men to openly express his homosexuality, despite it being sharply frowned upon back then.
I am nothing short of thrilled at hearing that Jared Leto is taking on the iconic artist. Leto has had a successful career portraying a different variety of characters up until this point. He’s played a suave, charming businessman (American Psycho), a psychotic killer (Chapter 27), a conflicted trans woman (Dallas Buyers Club), and more recently, a criminal madman (Suicide Squad). He’s performed all of these roles very well, and even more impressively, matched the physicality of each of them, gaining pounds of weight for Chapter 27 to going bone-skin thin in Dallas Buyers Club. He has both the talent and the physicality to match Warhol, and I’m very excited to see what he brings for the role.
We’ll have to wait until 2018 to see what Leto’s Warhol will look like. Until then, let’s just hope bananas aren’t involved.
– David Dunn
SOURCE: The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone
DAVID DUNN 