There’s a famous (and probably fictitious) anecdote about the filming of Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier’s Marathon Man: Hoffman—a noted method actor—supposedly ran himself ragged for days before one of the movie’s big scenes, avoiding sleep and pushing his body to the limits to best capture his character’s on-the-run desperation. When he got to set, he explained his preparations to his co-star, who pithily responded with the sort of advice that only a classically trained, Oscar-winning Shakespearean actor could, telling the younger actor, “Don’t be in a big-budget supervillain movie with Jared Leto, because he sounds like a prick.”
We might be slightly misremembering some of the details of that story, but the sentiment is one that that Leto’s Suicide Squad co-workers could likely get behind. We’ve already reported on some of the wacky hijinks the actor committed in his goal of capturing The Joker’s “old soul” for the film, like forcing his in-movie henchman to run insane errands for him or mailing a dead pig to the rest of the cast. But apparently Leto’s habit of mailing unwelcome biological materials to his colleagues didn’t stop at pigs (or rats, which he mailed to Margot Robbie), as he recently revealed that some of his little set gifts took on a decidedly D.I.Y. aesthetic.
According to an interview the actor recently gave to E! (and backed-up by co-stars Robbie and Will Smith, who proved their acting chops by not sounding righteously pissed off while talking about it), Leto also mailed anal beads and used condoms to the members of the Squad. Nobody explicitly spelled out what “used” means in this context, but given that Leto also apparently sent a “sticky” issue of Playboy to Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, the implication is clear: Jared Leto has stumbled onto the only job in America—outside of “telecommuting sperm donor,” we guess—where a man could mail his semen to his co-workers and not get wiped out by a Human Resources hit squad.
There’s a bright side to all these pranks/crimes, though, according to the Leto-induced Hollywood Stockholm Syndrome currently rattling around in Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s head: The stunts apparently worked to unify the cast, creating an “us-vs.-jizz mailer” mentality that allowed them to bond as a team. (To be clear, we do not recommend this method, or anything else Jared Leto has ever done, as a team-building exercise.)
For his own part, Leto said he was just following his maniacal, cum-posting muse: “I did a lot of things to create a dynamic to create an element of surprise, a spontaneity, and to really break down any kind of walls that may be there,” he told E! reporter Marc Malkin. “The Joker is somebody who doesn’t really respect things like personal space or boundaries.” Which, we’d like to remind everybody, is why people put him in prison whenever they possibly can.