Some actors get in shape for a role. Then there’s Jared Leto – who, it seems, hasn’t really been out of shape since the mid-nineties.
The 54-year-old Oscar winner, Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman and perennially polarising Hollywood mainstay – a man who once brought a replica of his own severed head to the Met Gala – has maintained the same lean, vascular physique across three decades of film roles, world tours and, increasingly, death-defying stunts.
In November 2023, for example, he became the first person to legally scale the outside of the Empire State Building, climbing from the 86th to the 104th floor in full gear. ‘I was more excited than nervous, to tell you the truth,’ he told Today afterwards. ‘But I have to be honest, it was very, very hard. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Just the endurance that it took, the stamina.’ He held up his bloodied left hand as proof.
That level of physical and mental resilience is fairly typical for Leto – a man who’s made challenge a central part of his life, rather than something attached to a pay cheque.
Jared Leto’s Diet
The foundation, by Leto’s own account, is unglamorous: clean eating and quality sleep, applied consistently for over two decades. When Rolling Stone asked him about it in 2016, he kept it simple: ‘Twenty solid years of eating vegetarian/vegan and taking care of myself. It’s probably just down to sleep and diet.’
That discipline has been tested by some of Hollywood’s most extreme physical transformations – on both ends of the scale. Leto dropped to 116 pounds (52kg), reportedly fasting for a month, to play a transgender woman with AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club – a performance that earned him an Oscar. In the opposite direction, he gained more than 60 pounds (27kg) on junk food to play John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, in Chapter 27.
He’s been clear about the cost of the latter: ‘It took about a year to get back to a place that felt semi-normal,’ he said. ‘I’d never do it again; it definitely gave me some problems.’
Between those extremes, the diet of PETA’s 2014 ‘World Sexiest Vegetarian’ is disciplined, but not rigid. He eats organic fruit and vegetables, complex carbohydrates and plant-based protein, while largely avoiding refined sugar and alcohol. In the same Rolling Stone interview, Leto described himself, with some self-awareness, as a ‘cheagan’ – a cheating vegan.
His exceptions? ‘If someone’s mom made a cookie and handed it to me, I’d probably take a bite,’ he said. ‘Or if I’m in Alaska and there’s wild salmon out of the river, I’d probably eat it.’
Jared Leto’s Training
Leto’s approach to training is built around doing things he actually enjoys, rather than forcing a rigid gym routine.
‘I don’t have a set routine,’ he told W Magazine, ‘but I love to rock climb and prioritise it in my life.’ His go-to spots include Yosemite National Park, Red Rock in Nevada and bouldering in Joshua Tree.
Away from climbing, he mixes in yoga, cycling and hiking. ‘Being in the wild – when you’re on a rock face like Yosemite, you’re not thinking about your f—ing emails,’ he told d TheWrap.
For more physically demanding roles, he’ll add structure. While preparing for Suicide Squad, he followed a simple but effective template: 20-minute bike warm-ups, followed by push-ups, pull-ups and sit-ups, five days a week.
The regimen was designed by director David Ayer, who wanted the cast to train as a unit. ‘I wanted to create a gymnasium of sorts for my actors,’ Ayer told Men’s Journal. ‘I wanted them to work and to suffer together so that camaraderie would come through onscreen.’
Trainer Brendan Johnston echoed that: ‘You wouldn’t imagine a cast this big, with so many different personalities, would be a good training environment – but they pushed each other to go harder. It sounds cliché, but everyone brought out the best in one another.’
Jared Leto’s Mindset
Sleep and meditation round out the picture.
Leto practises Vipassana – a silent, intensive form of meditation – and credits it, alongside diet and recovery, as a core pillar of his approach. ‘In the past few years, I’ve enjoyed learning to meditate,’ he told W Magazine. ‘Vipassana is about seeing clearly.’
The broader philosophy isn’t a short-term fitness plan – it’s a set of habits built over decades. No alcohol, no nicotine, real food, proper sleep and a willingness to do physically demanding things because they’re worth doing – not because they look good on camera.
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Ed Cooper is the former Deputy Digital Editor at Men’s Health UK, writing and editing about anything you want to know about — from tech to fitness, mental health to style, food and so much more. Ed has run the MH gauntlet, including transformations, marathons and er website re-designs. He’s awful at pub sports, though. Follow him: @EA_Cooper