Heath Ledger :: Hollywood Maverick

GQ : Febuary 2006

Heath Ledger has a lot to overcome--his Tigerbeat looks and that jousting movie, for two. Now a new dad at 26, the Oscar-worthy Aussie tells GQ how he did it.

He was a jousting, horse-riding creation of Hollywood, until he took himself off the hunk track and found honest work--in movies about Lotharios and gay cowboys, no less. Now, with a new love, a new baby and a whole lot of Oscar buzz behind him, we have to ask: Dude, what the hell were you thinking?

GQ February 2006

Heath Ledger, Take 2

Some actors are born credible. Some have credibility thrust upon them. And some actors have to work a little harder. This is basically the only way in which it sucks to be Heath Ledger, who-- because he is handsome, and charismatic, and Australian, and the one time beneficiary of a pretty excessive public-relations campaign designed to make the American moviegoer aware of those qualities--has not, until recently, been the kind of actor people associate with, y'know, acting.

The Ledger we got to know on-screen seemed totally fine with this state of affairs, at least at first. He was content to swagger and joust and brood his way through parts that required only the movie-star stuff he possessed in spades: his boldness, his easy physicality, his jolly surf's-up grin. This kind of work came naturally to him, and you could see him doing it without shame for the rest of his life. And then something weird happened.

"I guess pride came in and bit me on the ankle," Ledger says, and laughs. "I was really bored with the movies I'd done, and I was really bored with the choices I was given as a result of the boring work I'd done, and I realized I could be doing better."

Ledger is sitting at a table in a smallish New York coffeehouse, on one of those wet autumn mornings about which Suzanne Vega songs set in smallish New York coffeehouses have been written. The furniture is wobbly, and the restroom is for customers only. It's not the kind of low-lit celebrity petting zoo where you'd expect to find a personality of Ledger's renown, which may be why Ledger chose it. Here, a 26-year-old actor, particularly if he's patchily bearded and dressed in slouchy jeans and beat-up Nike Dunks, could almost pass for, say, an unemployed Web designer, just nursing a cappuccino and waiting out the rain. Of course, he's the only person in here who has to duck out periodically to feed the meter on a big silvery BMW sedan, which sort of blows his normal-guy cover.

But Ledger's genetically ill-suited for anonymity, anyway. He's a little too comfortable with the space his six-foot-two-inch frame takes up in the world, and the muscles of his jaw are a little too ropy, and his Aussie-accented voice--so preposterously deep it could belong to a circus strongman--cuts a little too handily through the background chatter, the dated trip-hop on the stereo, and the hiss of steaming milk.

He's grown into it over time, this voice. In his early films--if it isn't too absurd to speak of "early Heath Ledger films"--it bordered on bizarre. It set him apart from the cast of TV-groomed pip-squeaks he starred with in 1999's 10 Things I Hate About You, his American debut. The film--in which Ledger, as an ostensibly badass exchange student, sulks cutely under a helmet of black-dyed curls and feigns interest in Julia Stiles--is one of the dreariest high school romantic comedies ever green-lighted. Ledger was just happy to be there.

"I was 18 years old," he says. "The idea of being an Australian from Perth and getting offered a movie with Touchstone Pictures? I was like, 'Who gives a ****? Put me in your movie!' I thought, If I don't take this, maybe nothing will ever happen."

It was not the last lousy movie Ledger would make, but it was the last lousy movie he'd make in which the plot hinged on who would escort whom to the prom. And it got him an audition for the role of Gabriel Martin, the eldest son of a Ye Olde Roade Warrior type played by Mel Gibson, in the bloody Revolutionary War drama The Patriot. The fact that young Heath, who says he's always been a "terrible auditioner," basically stank up the room the first time he read for director Roland Emmerich--but still got the role because he was just that good!--instantly became part of the Ledger legend, which was growing by the day. There he was, getting the man-ingenue treatment on the cover of the August 2000 issue of Vanity Fair--baring a few inches of tanned, toned stomach, next to an optimistic blurb that invoked Gibson and Russell Crowe and touted Ledger as the hot new Aussie in Hollywood.

And for a minute there, this sales pitch had the benefit of almost being true. Ledger didn't actually have to do much in The Patriot except ride a horse, wield a flintlock, and not look ridiculous in a tri-cornered hat, yet it was enough to persuade Columbia Pictures to rush a Ledger star vehicle--the agreeably doofy medieval action-comedy A Knight's Tale--into production. A poster for the movie featured Ledger in close-up, scowling dreamily, above the tagline he will rock you. It was at this point that Heath Ledger began to freak out a little.

"My success, early on, was manufactured," Ledger says. "It was invested in by studios. They found this kid, they put him in a movie. They're like, 'Let's put his face on a poster. Let's put him on the cover of these magazines. Let's turn him into a star.' I wasn't ready for it. I felt like I hadn't done anything to deserve it."

Then, with a smile, and what we are fast coming to know as that Ledgerian self-effacement, he adds, "I couldn't act!"

So, like many actors with much to learn and even more to prove, he signed up for a small part in a modestly budgeted, ensembley indie film about abject human misery. In the 2001 drama Monster's Ball, Ledger, his square jaw quivering with intimidation and self-loathing, played a tormented death-row screw who spends his discretionary hours banging prostitutes, glumly, and offs himself before the movie's an hour old. His strong-but-not-showy performance helped him shed some of that he-will-rock-you baggage. And in a different way, so did his next few projects, resounding flops like the big-budget period epic The Four Feathers and the hunky-priest-battles-evil murkfest, The Order. Ledger says the failure of these films was the best thing that could have happened--and maybe it's easy for him to say this now, things having turned out as well as they have, but still.

"I needed to go out and make some bad movies and some interesting movies that weren't based on safe box-office choices," he says. "I almost didn't want them to make money. I wanted to suffocate [the hype] a little. And it worked. Because people quickly forget about you. They're like, 'Oh, your movies don't make money? **** off for a while.' It gives you space to sit back a little and get perspective on things.

"Consciously or subconsciously," he says, "I wanted to kind of destroy it all and shake it all up, and go, 'Back off, leave me alone. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that, and you're gonna hate all of it.' I needed to cleanse myself of this commercial filth that was being injected into me. I needed to be reborn."

It has stopped raining. Ledger is approached by another cafe patron, one Daniel Bedingfield, who is apparently a pop singer of not-insignificant acclaim in his native England (this we had to Google). Ledger is nothing but polite, but it's clear that the whole fellowship-of-the-famous angle Bedingfield's trying to work is lost on him.

"I've seen your movies," Bedingfield says, "and you've seen my album!"

He might as well have pointed out that he and Ledger are both mammals, for all the good it does. Ledger makes nice for a couple more seconds, until Bedingfield takes his leave. Then he leans toward us a little.

"Who was that?" he asks.

"I know there's a master narrative out there that says Heath was in these terrible movies, but I beg to differ," say Brokeback Mountain producer James Smamus, a big fan of Ledger's Australian breakthrough, the 1999 gangster flick Two Hands, directed by Gregor Jordan. "Gregor tapped into this part of Heath that's both heroic and vulnerable, and he's stunning."

The first sign that Ledger was still capable of working at that level came last summer with Lords of Dogtown. Uglied up to look like Peter Frampton after a few nights in a hobo encampment, he played surfboard shaper Skip Engblom, the Fagin-like ringleader of the Z-Boys skateboard team. Here, Ledger appeared to very much enjoy slicing the particular brand of ham the role required (a task he took up again as the titular puffy-shirted Lothario in the recent Casanova). And then there was "the gay-cowboy movie," in which Ledger, starring opposite the born-credible Jake Gyllenhaal, surprised nearly everyone by giving the best performance of his career--a restrained, heartbreaking depiction of emotions smothered. His work in the film has already garnered a slew of critics awards, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a drama. "He had that macho, western, nonverbal, turn-of-the-last-century aura," says Brokeback director Ang Lee. "He carries both aggression and fear, like two sides of a blade."

For a while, Ledger indulges our need for some actorly insight. He talks about how he tried to physicalize his character's repression with his voice: "I wanted any word that came out of his mouth to have to kind of punch its way past his tonsils and out through his lips." He says some other smart

things, but he's tugging at the cuffs and buckles of his coat as he says them, his right knee pumping. Self-promotional blather in the guise of shoptalk may be a standard mode of interview discourse, but--because he's genuinely humble, and routinely wary of coming off like a pretentious jackass--Ledger's reluctant to go there.

It's in this same reflexively modest spirit that Ledger shrugs off the steady drumbeat of Oscar talk his work in Brokeback has inspired. "I've never been in a movie that people liked so me so much," he says, "so I'm really suspicious of it."

The movie, the thought of a mantelpiece heavy with heraldic bling--Ledger insists that it all seems sort of small to him right now, preoccupied as he is with the new house he's moving into, and the woman sharing with him, and the fact that any day now she will give birth to their first child. The house is in Brooklyn's Boerum Hill neighborhood, and the woman is actress Michelle Williams, who played Ledger's wife in Brokeback. It is said that Ledger and Williams fell in love while shooting the film, as glamorous people thrown together on movie sets are wont to do, but a Mr. and Mrs. Smith situation this is not. The couple's scenes together are mostly about a marriage's slow death-by-gay-fishing-tam and are basically devoid of anything resembling erotic heat.

Understandably, perhaps, for a guy so eager to purge himself of showbiz narcissism, Ledger lights up when he talks about the kid. He's jacked about the prospect of spending every waking moment looking out for the welfare and happiness of another human being, and about doing it while he's still young and has energy and passion to bring to the job. And he's equally jacked about raising the kid in Brooklyn, a place he has come to love for the Europeanness of its boulevards and cafe's, its low brownstones and "vertical peripheral expanse," its warm neighborhoodishness. "There are so many young parents," Ledger says. "I love walking around with Michelle, beautifully pregnant, and watching the other mothers acknowledge her; they always kind of throw a wink or a little smile or a nod of encouragement."

The other thing about Brooklyn, of course, is that it's not Manhattan, nor is it Los Angeles. Only about five real celebrities currently live there, and most Brooklynites make a prideful point of being unfazed by their presence. (Steve Buscemi, buying paper towels? Yawn! Jennifer Connelly, perched on the edge of a Prospect Park sandbox, unwrapping her kid's string cheese? Whateva!) Ledger believes this will work in his favor--that he and Williams will be able to execute their parental responsibilities here without having to worry about outfoxing the paparazzi. When they left L.A., Ledger says, things were getting bad.

"At the end of my street, in Los Feliz, there'd always be cars waiting, and if you'd go out to pick up milk or drop your girl off at prenatal yoga, anywhere, they'd just follow you. I can outrun them; it takes going through red lights and almost wrapping your car around poles. But when poor Michelle wants to go out, she ends up just turning around and taking the car straight home, almost in tears, because she has these cars following her. I didn't want to raise a child under those conditions."

(This is both hopeful and hopelessly naive; a few weeks from now, a tabloid will all but give away the exact address of the Ledger-Williams home, and a small army of long-lensed snipers will set up camp outside the house. C'est la vie.)

We should admit here that as we question Ledger about the whole domesticity issue, we are really fishing for some trace of typical 26-year-old-male commitment phobia. We want to know if, as he prepared to make this leap, he'd glanced backward, even for a second, at the handsome-unattached-actor existence he was leaving behind. Pre-fatherhood, Ledger mowed down quite a swath of blonds, including Naomi Watts and Heather Graham, and it's hard to imagine forsaking a life in which one's dating pool includes Rollergirl without at least a twinge of regret. But Ledger is unfailingly sanguine. He talks only of upside, of having outgrown certain ways of living, of being ready for the circumstances into which he's stumbled.

He tells us about selling his Los Feliz bachelor pad, a Spanish-style estate built in the 1920s. When A Knight's Tale opened, such was Ledger's juice at the time that he made the studio fly fourteen of his closest friends-guys he'd known since he was 4 years old, guys who'd never been out of Perth--to Los Angeles, and they all jammed into Heath's place. Over time some of them moved out and others moved in. Ledger says it was like a commune: "There was a lot of cooking. Everyone was providing each other with support, or food, or bits of money here and there."

Ah, yes--a successful young actor and his pals, sharing palatial digs, just chopping vegetables together and kicking around the Hacky Sack. To hear Ledger tell it, they engaged in no Entourage-ish shenanigans whatsoever, never taking the opportunity, say, to pack the hot tub with tipsy Qantas stewardesses.

Either way, when he left, it was the end of an era. "The house was packed up and I'd separated all my belongings," Ledger says. "Half of it was going to Bronte, in Australia, where I have a house. The other half was going to Brooklyn. And I was just standing in between, thinking, God, that's never going to sit next to that ever again. And I--I--I walked around, and I quite literally hugged the walls. I was, like, hugging posts in the house, and I was looking at corners, light sockets, and wall fittings, and the view. I was stamping it in my memory--just looking at everything, and saying good-bye to the tree I looked at for years, and the hawks and the ravens that would fight and quarrel in the sky out in front of our house. And then I just had to take a deep breath and close my eyes and ****in' march out the front door."

He is telling us how impending fatherhood forces you to sort out your issues, because life will no longer be all about you--which is both admirable and a little worrisome to hear, considering that when we were 26, cactus ownership seemed like an unacceptably high level of responsibility--and then his cell phone chirps. Ledger flips it open, scans a text message. He looks up and smiles.

"She's two centimeters dilated," he says.

"Congratulations," we say. "What, uh, does that mean?"

"It means the race is on," he says. "It means we gotta finish moving in to the house, because any minute, today or tomorrow, we could go into labor. It's a good message to get."

Matilda Rose Ledger is born, without undue incident, on October 28, 2005. Soon after, we meet up with Ledger again, in the backyard of an otherwise deserted wine bar on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Earnestly, the new father reports that things have been good, quiet, almost monastically calm, like he's pared his life down to a haiku. Ledger cooks for Williams all day, calls Australia at night, doesn't think about work much at all. Maybe he should be looking for a project to spend his Broke-back capital on right now--that **** don't compound annually--but he hasn't read a script in a year. He is doing his impression of late-'70s John Lennon, holed up in the Dakota, contentedly baking bread. But you also get the sense that he is imagining a world in which he could keep on like this forever. He stares over the bar's back fence, listening to the birds, swirling the wine--a really leggy Bordeaux--in his glass.

"I'm just so comfortable right now," he says. "Really relaxed. I find I'm liking myself more for it"--the Matilda-rearing, he means--"and I'm learning more about myself. I have a lot more time to think. And when you do get a slice of freedom, you do something with it. If you're going to watch a movie, you make sure it's a good one. You get to siphon out the crap."

And if you're going to make a movie? Same deal, presumably. From here on in, if Heath Ledger rocks us, it will be in the manner of his choosing.

Consider the crap siphoned.