Jared Leto's Net Worth Blows Other Actors' Out of the Water
Born in December 1971 in Bossier City, LA, Jared Leto is an American actor and musician. Leto first gained major fame through his role as Jordan Catalano in My So-Called Life and has continued to have a lucrative career for the last 30 years.
From his parts in popular movies like Suicide Squad to his time as the lead vocalist of the American rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars, here's everything that's contributed to Leto's net worth.
Related: Taylor Swift's Epic Net Worth Just Made Her the Wealthiest Female Musician Ever
What Is Jared Leto's Net Worth?
While Leto's net worth isn't public knowledge, the combination of cash earned from movies, tours, ticket sales, and real estate has provided the Morbius actor with a whopping $90 million net worth, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
Jared Leto's Life Before Fame
From a young age, Leto gained a love for the arts and travel from his mother who encouraged her children to be creative. Leto spent much of his childhood moving from place to place when he was young and his free spirit didn't end when the rest of his peers were going to college.
"I come from a visual background, and I grew up around a lot of hippies and artists," he told Interview Magazine. "My mom and my brother and I moved around a lot. We basically moved every couple of years, and I went to a lot of different schools. But creativity, for us, was always a way of life. It was never a job. Being an artist was a passion and a way of life.
Related: Everything to Know About Brad Pitt's Non-Celebrity Girlfriend, Ines de Ramon
After graduating from high school, he enrolled at Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., before moving on to Philadelphia's University of the Arts to study painting. He later switched to the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he majored in filmmaking. After dropping out during his third year, he packed his bags and moved to Los Angeles in hopes of becoming an actor.
"I dropped out because I thought I would have a better chance at directing a film if I got a job as an actor first," he told Interview Magazine. "So that’s one of the reasons why I headed west with a backpack and a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. I went to California and ended up sleeping on the beach in Venice, and that was really the beginning for me."
Jared Leto's Music and Acting Career
Almost immediately after moving to L.A., Leto began to land minor parts on television shows like Camp Wilder, where he played motorcycle-riding bad boy Dexter. Just two years later, he landed his breakout role playing Jordan Catalano in ABC's teen drama My So-Called Life. While the show only ran for one season, people fell in love with its portrayal of adolescence—and Leto himself.
Once the show ended, Leto moved on to appear in several other television shows and movies including Cool and the Crazy alongside Clueless actress Alicia Silverstone, How to Make an American Quilt starring Winona Ryder, The Last of the High Kings, and Switchback in 1997.
The same year Switchback came out, Leto starred in Prefontaine, a story about Olympic hopeful Steve Prefontaine. This film is rumored to have been when Leto's love for method acting really took hold. In fact, it's said that the Urban Legend star even immersed himself in the runner's life, training for weeks before the film and regularly meeting with Prefontaine's family and friends to get a better idea of who the athlete was.
"Steve (the film's director) and I would be sitting around saying, ‘Well it didn’t really happen like that,’ about the strangest things, which, you know, no one would really care," Leto told the Daily Bruin. "But you get a little obsessive at times. From the beginning, we really set high standards for ourselves. We had the family involved and they really opened their hearts to me and to the filmmakers. I shot to make the family proud. That was my goal and I figured if I did that, everybody else would be just fine."
Related: Sabrina Carpenter’s Net Worth Triples That of Ex
The same year Leto also appeared in several other films including Basil, Urban Legend, and The Thin Red Line alongside Sean Penn and Adrien Brody.
While still supporting himself as an actor, Leto and his brother Shannon formed the American rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars. Music is something Leto claims he's been doing pretty much his entire life, even in the background as he was making movies.
"I think it’s really common for art-school kids to be in bands or making music—or creative people in general, I’ve found," he told Interview. "A lot of the creative people that I grew up around did a bunch of different things, whether it was a visual artist making pottery or a performance artist who did sculpture. Most of them had to have other jobs as well in order to pay the rent, so people did things like graphic design work and painted signs. But music was always a part of my life—and then it became a bigger part as my brother came out to California and we continued to make music together."
For the next 20 years, Leto continued to make movies and create music. Shortly after the inception of his band, he was featured in an array of note-worthy movies such as Girl, Interrupted and Fight Club, a film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel that was directed by legendary director David Fincher. He then went on to appear in other films like American Psycho, Highway, Chapter 27, Artifact, Suicide Squad, and House of Gucci, all while having a successful music career.
Related: Most Beautiful Woman in the World, According to Science