Category Archives: Films

Elijah Wood and Jared Leto

One of music’s most mercurial figures, Jared Leto of 30 Seconds to Mars, is getting the documentary treatment as part of the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.

In Artifact, the actor and rock star exposes his soul as his band faces off against their record label, Virgin/EMI, in a bitter court battle and also works on a follow-up to their album A Beautiful Lie.

Spinner’s uncertain whether we’ll be able to talk to the notoriously press-weary “Jordan Catalano” during the festival, but we did recently ask his fellow music-loving actor Elijah Wood about the pair’s much-publicized spat at the 2006 MTV U Woodie Awards. Basically, Wood, who just curated a vinyl rarities box set, once confessed to Blender Magazine that he wasn’t overly fond of the whole musician-turned-actor thing.

“I would never try to be like other actors and attempt to make [music] myself. I mean, have you heard 30 Seconds to Mars?… Fucking awful, man!” he was quoted as saying in their January/February 2003 issue. Leto didn’t take kindly to the comment and very publicly yelled and cursed at the Lord of the Rings actor at the MTV event. Although Wood dismissed the confrontation as “ridiculous” in a subsequent interview with Jane magazine, the bizarre event has developed a sort of mythic status among music geeks over the years, enough so that we felt the need to check in with Wood and see if there was any lingering hard feelings between the two actors.

“I have no idea,” Wood tells Spinner. “There’s certainly no animosity from my perspective. I think, honestly nothing really happened. I don’t think that there was anything to smooth over. Not like there was something or some sort of grudge that started that night. I don’t know. I’ve seen him at things and I’ve not, like, talked to him or anything.”

As minor as the actual situation was, though, he does regret making that original comment in retrospect.

“I think I partially made a mistake in saying that I didn’t like that band and that wasn’t really… I try to stay away from criticism just because if you can’t say anything nice, it’s not really good to say anything at all.”

These days Wood has a much more positive attitude toward anyone who wants to branch out and try different things.

“I think anybody should be able to do what they want to do creatively,” he says. “I think my thing was that it didn’t always yield the best results, but you can say that about pretty much anyone in one profession moving to a different profession. But I think that also, to a certain degree, that was narrow-minded of me as well, because I think that everybody should have the opportunity, without criticism, to jump into anything they want, if there’s something that they want to express themselves in.”

This story originally ran September 13, 2012 on Spinner.