Jared Leto inhaled and then let fly. “I was born in Louisiana and climbed out of the muddy banks of the Mississippi,” said the actor, rock star and, as of 2015, self-proclaimed cult leader. “My brother and I lived on food stamps. We came from a very humble blue collar background, with a vagabond hippy mother. It's an experience that informs us to this day…”

It was 2009 and Leto was discussing his pomp-rock project 30 Seconds To Mars. Specifically, the criticism that fronting a stadium band was just another role for an actor who had catapulted on to the a-list in Darren Aronofsky’s drug addiction drama Requiem For A Dream in 2000.

“He's a professional actor in music; so there’s no way to feel any sincerity about his position as a musician,” Ben Gibbard of indie darlings Death Cab For Cutie had stated of Leto. “He makes a living playing characters…You're also acting what you think a rock star should act like.”

Leto did not take kindly to that line of reasoning, though he insisted it didn’t put him off. Nor was he distracted by the fact actors historically made for awful musicians. ”It wasn't going to stop me from moving forward," he told me. "Someone else’s failure is not a reason to stop pursuing my dreams.”

The Leto of a decade and a bit ago led a charmed existence. He chose his screen roles with care and invariably received rapturous write-ups. And 30 Seconds To Mars were on their way to becoming a genuinely massive band. All these years on, however, as the former (highly controversial) Joker prepares to return once more to the comic book universe, as vampiric Marvel anti-hero Morbius, he cuts a more complicated figure.

As Morbius, Leto, 50, looks set to be left dangling by his cape slightly. Early reviews of the Sony feature – the studio received the rights to the character when acquiring the Spider-Man licence in the late 1990s – have been dismal, to put it kindly.

Leto, said The Telegraph, resembled a “cross between Russell Brand and a Barbary macaque”. Which was obviously a terribly hurtful thing to say about Barbary macaques. “The single most anaemic movie ever made,” agreed Rolling Stone.

Bad reviews don’t always stop a super-hero in his tracks. But the big news in comic book fandom this week is Oscar Isaac looking like a human Tipp-Ex bottle in Moon Knight on Disney+. We’re all here for Isaac in his cloud-white pyjamas and Frank Spencer stab at a British accent. Oscar-winner Leto as a morally ambivalent vampire flapping around in a baroque dressing gown…we could take or leave.

The past few weeks have not been a fantastic time for bearded 40-somethings with guru-like auras. Russell Brand’s bonkers pronouncements on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were widely derided. And now in swoops Leto as Morbius, looking every centimetre the ridiculous rock star lost on the way to a 30 Seconds To Mars concert.

Ridiculous has, of course, been Leto’s go-to for some time. In the early days of the pandemic – when we really could all do with a laugh – he provoked global mirth by declaring he was the last person on the planet to know about Covid.

“Wow. Twelve days ago I began a silent meditation in the desert,” he wrote on Instagram. “Walked out yesterday into a very different world. One that's been changed forever. Mind blowing – to say the least. I'm getting messages from friends and family all around the globe and catching up on what's going on.”

Still, Leto may have felt he was prepared for a doomsday scenario, having paid $5 million for a military bunker in the Hollywood Hills in 2017. In a town where everything is fake, this was the real deal: a 10,000 square-foot compound with four-foot thick blast-walls, a dedicated fall-out shelter and its own air traffic control tower.

“There are so many crazy rumours about this place,” Leto said at the time “Everything from 'Part of the moon landing was filmed here' to 'They used to keep prisoners downstairs.' They had laboratories. They were doing all kinds of God-knows-what.”

The property also had space for rehearsal rooms for 30 Seconds To Mars, the group he founded with his brother Shannon and which has been variously accused of “empty euphoria” (The Guardian) and described as “a facile crescendo of mega-angst” (Spin).

And it is arguably 30 Seconds To Mars which has facilitated Leto’s preening ego, rather than anything he has achieved on screen. As anyone who has been to one of the concerts will know, part of the deal with being a fan of the band is that you worship the ground Leto walks on, the air he breathes and the mosh-pit into which he has just leaped (having harangued security guards throughout the set).

The cult-like component of 30 Seconds To Mars fandom has actually been acknowledged by the group. Since 2015, Leto has staged 30 Seconds To Mars “Summer Camps” for fans. Activities included yoga, cooking classes and – well, there’s always a downside – 30 Seconds To Mars performances.

In 2019, he took the camp to Croatia, where fans, who called themselves “The Echelon”, soaked up the sunshine and wore white robes. As did Leto, who looked like Jesus with a God complex. Just so nobody missed what he was going for, the band’s social media wrote: “Yes, this is a cult #MarsIsland.” 

Leto may have styled himself the head of cult but his childhood reads closer to a Southern Gothic novel. He was born in impoverished Bossier City in northwestern Louisiana, where major local industry was a trio of riverside casinos. His father, Tony Bryant, abandoned the family when he was an infant. Leto recalled his father’s last words as, “I'll see you kid, just going to the store to get a carton of milk”.

Bryant would die by suicide when Leto was eight. His mother Constance had by then moved back in with her parents. She later married Carl Leto, Jared’s adoptive father. Still, there was little stability in Leto’s life. By 16, he was taking drugs and paying for his habit with theft.

“There was a moment, involving a gun and some cocaine, that may have been a turning point for me. I knew it wasn't good,” he would say. He turned himself around, though and, aged 22, had his big break, as Jordan Catalano in teen drama My-So-Called-Life.

It’s probably as well Leto and the his 30 Seconds To Mars “Echelon” have a strong bond. Cinema has proved a less supportive environment. In 2014, he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting actor for playing a transgender character in Dallas Buyer’s Club. However his campaign to carve out a space in blockbusters came unstuck with his disastrous turn in James Ayer’s Suicide Squad in 2016.

The problem wasn’t Leto on screen – he was perfectly fine as a sleazy Joker (he returned to the character in a new scene filmed for Zack Snyder’s four-hour Justice League from last year). The issue was his behaviour off-camera, and rumours he had gone too far trying to freak out other cast members.

“He did some bad things, Jared Leto did. He gave some really horrific gifts,” said Suicide Squad star Viola Davis. “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. And that was our introduction into Jared Leto.”

Along with the pigs, Leto was said to have sent used condoms, dead rats and pornographic magazines. Even Will Smith – an actor whom we can now safely say is no stranger to controversy – was weirded out.

“First we found out that Jared wasn't going to be in rehearsals,” said Smith, who played Deadshot. “And we were like, 'That's messed up! How is he not going to be in rehearsals?' And then there was a bag on the door, and this dude barges in and throws a dead pig on the floor in front of us. We're like, “OK. Jared has officially set off the Suicide Squad. He went full Joker”.”

Going “full Joker” was not a new innovation. Through his career, he has taken method acting to extremes. In preparation for Morbius, Leto met  “doctors and patients who could teach him about living with a rare, incurable blood disease”. To walk with a cane – as Morbius does in the film – he “studied with real cane users”. “I remember fearing for this guy’s spine,” said co-star Adria Arjona.

He’d taken things ever further appearing opposite Lady Gaga in Ridley Scott’s House Of Gucci. “I did it all,” Leto i-D magazine. “I was snorting lines of arrabbiata sauce”.  In Blade Runner 2049, in which he played a villainous and blind tech evangelist, he wore special contact lenses that dramatically reduced his vision.

“He was walking with an assistant, very slowly,” director Dennis Villeneuve told the Wall Street Journal. “It was like seeing Jesus walking into a temple. Everybody became super silent, and there was a kind of sacred moment. Everyone was in awe.”

Most drastic of all was Dallas Buyer’s Club, for which he shed weight by eating nothing but cucumbers. “I stayed in character the entire shoot. I couldn't imagine doing it another way. I'd gone too far to pick it up and drop it off,” he informed the Guardian. “I lost around 40lb [almost three stone/18kg] and then I stopped counting. For me, it was about how it made me feel, how it made other people treat me. I got down to something like 114lb [about eight stone], and that was enough to do what I wanted it to do, which was to change everything about me.”

Suicide Squad was a mess and Leto’s scenes were cut significantly. He would later deny the grisliest of the rumours and was reportedly outraged when Warner Bros announced it was pivoting to a Joker origin story starring Joaquin Phoenix, directed by Todd Phillips (for which Phoenix would win an Oscar).

“Leto’s frustration that Warner Bros was moving ahead with the Phillips project was so great early on that he tried to throttle the rival Joker in its cradle,” according to a 2019 article in the Hollywood Reporter. 

“According to sources familiar with Leto’s behaviour, when the Oscar-winning actor learned of the Phillips project, he not only complained bitterly to his agents at CAA, who also represent Phillips, but asked his music manager, Irving Azoff, to call the leader of Warners’s parent company.”

And so we arrive at 2022 and Morbius. It’s Leto’s second significant part of the year. He’s just starred opposite Anne Hathaway in We Crashed, Apple TV +’s underwhelming chronicling of the rise and fall of the We Work startup (ironically – or perhaps appropriately – Leto has made reportedly made a $90 million fortune from early investments in tech companies such as Airbnb and Uber).

Now comes Morbius, a project about which only Leto seems to have any enthusiasm. Still, regardless of its quality, many will hope it is a success and spawns a franchise. The obvious worry is that otherwise Leto may reach for his Jesus robes and inflict another 30 Seconds To Mars record on an unsuspecting world. After the pandemic and Will Smith at the Oscars, surely we’ve suffered enough already.