The actor will also produce the film with Michael De Luca, with Terence Winter set to write the script.
Jared Leto, Michael De Luca and Terence Winter have come together to deal with the life of Andy Warhol, the famous pop art artist whose blend of art and commerce made him a household name.
Leto will play the artist biopic, titled Warhol and produce, along with De Luca, the producer whose credits include such Oscar-winning and nominated real life stories as social network and Captain Phillips.
Winter, the creator of Boardwalk Empire, who wrote The Wolf of Wall Street, will write the script, using the 1989 book Victor Bockris, Warhol: Biography, as a starting point. (Leto and De Luca jointly acquired the rights to the book, after having had a desire to collaborate on a project for some time, according to sources.)
Warhol broke into the art world in the 1960s with works that raised the American consumerism to artistic heights, demonstrating that even the Campbell soup cans, bottles and celebrities Coca-Cola can be spun into art.
Openly homosexual before such a thing was accepted, Warhol created an art studio called The Factory, which attracted swathes of New York society (not to speak of an unbalanced or two person, as an artist almost killed him when she he shot him in 1968) and crank out art ranging from silk screens for movies to music.
Warhol himself managed Velvet Underground Lou Reed for a while. In later years, he was a fixture in the famous scene nightclub Studio 54 in New York and was a mentor to a new generation of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, before dying in 1987.
Warhol was a hypochondriac who, according to his friends and acquaintances, vacillated between a cold and superficial person – sometimes quiet, sometimes the spotlight – a brilliant eccentric wearing wigs and even got to have them cut hair salons.
The party seems tailor-made for Leto, who won an Oscar for playing a gay dying of AIDS in 2013 Dallas Buyers Club and drew legions of fans for their opinion about the crazy Batman villain The Joker in The suicide this summer squad. (The actor is currently filming the sequel Untitled Blade Runner directed by Denis Villeneuve being.)
And the project plays to the strengths of the figures on the actual screen De Luca life. In addition to adapting the life of Mark Zuckerberg and Captain Richard Phillips, who brought the story of Oakland coach Billy Beane One screen with drama Moneyball Brad Pitt. (His next film heads in the opposite direction:
Fifty Shades Darker, the sequel to S & M romancer fifty shades of gray.)
Leto, producing through his production shingle Paradox, and De Luca, producing with his flag Michael De Luca Productions, are not the target of a low-budget indie with Warhol, but rather a strong current project with credentials prestige.
Part of that prestige comes from winter write, which was nominated for an Oscar for writing Wolf of Wall Street and won Emmys for work on The Sopranos and nominated for Boardwalk Empire. The last time co-created HBO vinyl.
Leto, De Luca and winter are all repped by CAA, who helped negotiate the agreement.
