Nearly six months after Jared Leto won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the 42-year-oold star revealed he's yet to see Dallas Buyers Club in its entirety. In fact, during Thursday's Times Talks conversation with New York Times contributor Logan Hill, he plugged his ears when a clip was played.
"I can't hear that voice! I've never really heard very much of it and I've never watched the film. I will at some point, I'm sure. But too soon!" he said. "It can never live up to the expectations I would have of it now because it was such a beautiful experience and the response that it got was really wonderful."
Leto hadn't acted in six years before he was cast as a drug addicted, HIV-positive transgender woman in the tense drama. "It'll be 16 years before I make another movie!" the 30 Seconds to Mars rocker joked.
When Leto accepted his Oscar, he said he felt "panic," "fear" and "a little more panic."
"The funny thing that happens is you do have all of these events happening, so it's not like you can just obsess on that one thing. It's not like you can save everything for that one night," the documentarian explained. "And also, you don't know if you're going to get it. So, you don't want to be too cocky, you don't want to have something planned out, because you don't want to jinx this incredible moment."
"I knew that there were certain things that I wanted to talk about and things that were specific and authentic to who I was. When you have this to you—when you win your Academy Award—I think that you have a choice. You can take that light and you can absorb it or you can reflect it and you can shine it can share it with the rest of the world," the "Up in the Air" singer said. "You know what choice I made."
"When you win an Academy Award, you don't get a trophy. You don't get a pat on the back. Your award—reward—is you get a chance to stand in front of the world...and say something that's meaningful to you, meaningful to someone else, you make your choice," he said. "But I was very clear on that opportunity. I think only because I had played hundreds and hundreds of shows, I played stages around the world, that I was able to get up there and my brain happened to work in that moment."
Awards season in general was a whirlwind.
"I was talking to [Leonardo DiCaprio] at the golden Globes and he said, 'When you're standing up there, it's just gone," he recalled. "And I remember standing there...and I'm like, 'Holy, s--t! OK! we're here.'"
"I looked out and you see all these faces. It's Meryl Streep it's [Oprah Winfrey] and it's Harrison Ford—it's all these people. And then who do I look at? Robert f--king De Niro, the scariest guy in the entire place. And he's looking at me like, 'What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do, kid?'" Leto said. "I knew that it was an incredible opportunity and I wanted to thank my brother...and my mom. I knew I wanted to say something about this great big planet that we've had the privilege to travel around."
"Those moments, are similar to how I feel about being on stage with the band," Leto concluded. "It's not about me—it's about everyone else."