Hot Press meets Jared Leto from 30 Seconds To Mars

Sitting comfortably cross-legged on a couch in his luxury suite at London’s Soho Hotel, Hollywood heartthrob, alt. rock icon and seemingly decent skin, Jared Leto, is explaining why his band decided to launch their latest single into outer space.

“I wanted to do something that had never been done before,” the 41-year-old says, speaking in a soft and slightly nerdish American accent. “I didn’t just want to throw the song on a website. I wanted to do something unique, something creative, and have an adventure. It’s not just the launch of a single. It’s the launch of the new album, a new tour, and a new chapter of our lives. It’s something that’s really important to us, and it came from a really organic place.”
Album send-offs come in all sorts of budgetary shapes, sizes and surprises, but when your band is called Thirty Seconds To Mars, and your single is titled ‘Up In The Air’ (the first cut from forthcoming fourth album Love, Lust, Faith + Dreams), nothing less than a launch of the NASA variety will suffice.
“I’d been wanting to do something with NASA for ages,” he says. “My grandfather was in the Air Force, so I think that aviation was always a part of our lives. We used to go visit him at the base or hang-out on the tarmac while he was flying around as a pilot. So it all stemmed from that.”
It took a huge amount of organisation, but on March 18, in partnership with the US space agency, the very first copy of ‘Up In The Air’ – a dark, thumping, edgy and energetic SF-tinged rocker – was carried aboard the SpaceX cargo mission to the international space station. The single got its groundbreaking premiere from the astronauts in orbit 230 miles above Earth. It wasn’t quite the Red Planet, but it was fairly impressive nonetheless.
Leto and his two bandmates – drummer brother Shannon Leto and keyboardist Tomo Milicevic – were standing by at Mission Control Houston while the track was played. Afterwards they did a live interview with orbiting astronaut Tom Marshburn. The whole thing was such a big deal that Annise D. Parker, Mayor of the City of Houston, proclaimed March 18 as ‘Thirty Seconds To Mars Day’.
We’re meeting in London just five days after the event, and Leto is obviously still buzzed from the whole experience.
“I made the CD myself,” he tells me. “I scribbled the name on it because the album wasn’t done at the time. So I wrote a note, put it in the CD case and – boom! – sent it up to space! Unbelievably, they wanted a CD – we thought it was gonna be some other format, flash-drive or something. But that’s what they have in the space station, so they shot it up. They unpacked 5,000 lbs of scientific gear and one CD.
“Then we went back to Houston for the next NASA trip which was about a week-and-a-half later. We went into Mission Control which is this giant room like you see in the movies, with all these guys sitting in front of computers and these giant screens – these real-time HD screens – where they’re constantly monitoring the space station and keeping tabs on everything. And then in floats this astronaut, right into frame, he’s right there and we’re talking with him. I’m on this phone from, like, 1962, this old phone, this landline that somehow gets beamed up there. And we have this really great conversation about life in space, and in the middle of it he reaches over and flicks something and spins it around in zero gravity – and it’s our CD!”
From Bruce Willis and Russell Crowe to Kevin Bacon and Keanu Reeves, the history of Hollywood actors having a stab at rock ‘n’ roll fame is not particularly distinguished (Johnny Depp is probably one of the few credible exceptions). However, nobody could ever accuse Leto of being a musical dilettante. Formed in LA in 1998 as little more than a hobby for him and his older brother, Shannon, Thirty Seconds To Mars have sold in excess of five million albums, bagged numerous awards, and inspired legions of devoted fans who call themselves ‘The Echelon’.
They’ve also toured relentlessly. So much so that, having played 311 shows in almost 60 countries to three million people in just over two years in support of their third studio album, 2009’s million-selling This Is War, the band now hold the Guinness World Record for ‘Longest Concert Tour By a Rock Band’.
So how was that experience?
“I was fucking knackered by the end of it, man,” Leto laughs. He’s well familiar with Irish vernacular, having spent a couple of months based in Dublin while filming The Last Of The High Kings in 1996. “I really love Ireland. The shows we’ve played over there have been incredible. We played the O2, I think, and that was just fantastic.”
A former squeeze of Cameron Diaz, whom he dated for three years, Leto has starred in a number of successful movies, including Requiem For A Dream, Prefontaine, Panic Room, American Psycho and Girl, Interrupted (he also appeared briefly in Fight Club, playing the bleached blond waiter who gets beaten to a bloody pulp by Ed Norton).
In recent years, however, he’s mostly been concentrating on his music career.
“Well, I don’t have much of an acting career these days,” he shrugs. His new movie, The Dallas Buyers Club, in which he stars alongside Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner, will be released this summer, but prior to that, “I hadn’t made a film in five years, and that’s fine with me.”
Such is his devotion to Thirty Seconds To Mars that he once famously turned down a leading role in Clint Eastwood’s Flags Of Our Fathers to go on tour as the support act for The Used.
“I did, yeah,” he nods. “I think that’s okay. You can’t do everything. And sometimes I think that you’re more defined by what you don’t do than what you do.”
In addition to acting and songwriting, he’s also a director, producer, painter, photographer and businessman. A true renaissance man, he doesn’t like to define himself as being any one particular thing.
“I see myself as a creative person. I like to create things and share them with people. I probably do as much directing and editing as I do anything else because I’m always working, whether it’s a documentary or a video or another piece of content. There’s always something. My editor is out here working at the moment so I’ll probably be working with him until three or four in the morning.
“I solve creative problems,” he continues. “Sometimes I make creative problems for myself, too. I do a lot of design, a lot of art, I do photography, I direct quite a bit, so I don’t see myself in any one area. I love what Andy Warhol said: ‘labels are for cans, not for people’. And I do think that the world is actually changing quite a bit, and it’s very common now for people to have all kinds of different jobs before they’re even 30 years old. And I’m not the only one who’s doing that, it’s nothing special, but I do believe in following your creative instinct.”
Right now, he’s incredibly excited about the new album. Such is the record company’s paranoia about Love, Lust, Faith + Dreams leaking that Hot Press was only allowed one listen to it in an office in Universal HQ prior to this interview (they even attempted to confiscate my mobile). Although difficult to judge on a single spin, it’s an epic, filmic, experimental and often heavy-sounding record with lots of unpredictable musical flourishes. There may have been zithers.
“I think it’s the best thing we’ve ever done,” he enthuses. “I think it’s going to be a defining album for us. And I think it’s unexpected. People are going to be very surprised.”
From Europe to India to the band’s California studio, much of the album was written and recorded while Thirty Seconds To Mars were out on the road.
“I wrote all over the world first, and then as soon as I got done touring in December – literally a week-and-a-half after I finished touring – I went to India and I wrote some more. I had this sort of portable studio built.”
The album was produced by Leto, with previous collaborator Steve Lilywhite (U2, Peter Gabriel, Rolling Stones) working on four of the 12 tracks.
“Yeah, we brought him back. He worked on the last album. He’s a madman, and he helped us to make a better record. It was great to work with him again. I like to continue relationships and I think it’s wonderful to do that.”
The Indian influence is apparent on songs such as ‘Pyres Of Varanasi’.
“Yeah, you can hear it, right! I wrote that song on the spot in a beautiful location on a cliff overlooking the most amazing sunset ever. And all these kids started to hear the music and they climbed up this cliff with this fortress behind us, and they were dancing around as I was writing the song on the spot. That was a magical and unforgettable moment.”
He explains that Love, Lust, Faith + Dreams is actually a concept album, with at least one of those words appearing in every
single song.
“They’re all songs written in and about these themes, and those words appear in every single song on the album. It’s very focused that way. I look at these four themes as cornerstones in the pyramid of life or whatever. Not to sound too convoluted about it but they’re very important words, ideas, topics, themes. Very mundane in some way, and we use them dismissively all the time. They’re very familiar, but without them there’s really no life at all. There’s certainly not a fulfilling life even with the absence of one.
“The last album was really about conflict. We’d fought our record label, they sued us for $30 million. We battled it out for a couple of years and won and we made a film about it called Artifact that’ll come out this summer. You know, we survived. So that kind of felt like the end of a chapter, and this is the beginning of a new one.”
He brightens when asked about the lines, ‘I punish you with pleasure and pleasure you with pain.’
“Ha! You’re the very first person to ask me about the lyrics. That’s on a song called ‘End Of All Days’. I wrote it on an acoustic guitar and I remember the exact moment, too. It was in February 2011. That song relates to faith and to lust. ‘Up In The Air’ also relates to lust and to dreams. But I think it’s also important that both of those songs deal with sexuality. And you know what they say about sex, everything is about sex, except for sex; sex is about power.
“So sexuality and sex are debated and discussed, there’s a conversation about that, which is good as well because I feel like in rock music it’s a conversation that’s avoided a lot. There’s a lot of asexuality, and the absence of that conversation, and it’s an important thing to discuss. It’s one of the primal needs of people.”
The album cover is one of UK artist Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings, intriguingly titled Isonicitonic Acid Ethyl Ester. Hirst famously sent a painting to Mars on the British Beagle 2 lander back in 2002. Is that why they chose him?
“Well, it’s because he’s a dreamer. And because he’s one of a kind: a maverick. And it’s a real honour to have his artwork grace the cover of this CD, and not only just the front. On the CD itself there’s another piece that’s absolutely beautiful. So yeah, I think NASA, Damien Hirst and Thirty Seconds To Mars do have that in common; we’re all in the business of making dreams reality.”
Just before I leave, Leto pulls up his t-shirt to reveal a Latin expression tattooed over his right nipple.
“Provehito in Altum,” he says, underlining the words with his finger. “It means ‘launch forward into the deep’. To live your
dreams, basically.”

Love, Lust, Faith and Dreams is released on May 17 on EMI Records.