Jared Leto never shies away from intense and disturbing roles.
His recent turn as the Joker in Suicide Squad was chilling enough but now he is unleashing an evenmore violent side in teh new Netflix drama.
The Outsider is set in Japan in the years after World War II.
Leto plays Nick Lowell, an American ex-soldier who has risen in the brutal ranks of the yakuza after making an alliance with his cell-mate.
Leto’s prisoner-of-war has somehow gained his freedom in exchange for serving the yakuza but doesn’t seem uncomfortable with his choices.
Instead he appears equally at home at their formal fuctions with geisha girls and sumo wrestlers as he does when he has to save himself from execution by blowing away the three men holding guns on him.
The trailer gives very little away but establishing a tense and sleek atmosphere that will fit right in with Netflix’s most recent raft of dark crime dramas and sensational epics like Altered Carbon and Troy – Fall of a City.
Unsuccessful incarnations of The Outsider have been bubbling under for a few years in Hollywood, with Tom Hardy and Michael Fassbender both previously attached in the lead role.
Leto will return to the DC universe as The Joker in the future alongside Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn. HOwevere a new alternate Joker origin movie may go into production in May, with rumoured star Joaquin Phoenix and Martin Scorsese producing.
THE OUTSIDER LAUNCHES ON NEXFLIX ON MARCH 9