Heath Ledger never even watched movies until he stumbled his way into acting. Now, thanks to a career makeover, he has four films about to hit Australian screens. He spoke with Stephanie Bunbury.

 

 

He's our boy, Heath Ledger. Anyone can see he's Australian: he's got that look, the same look as the bloke you see hanging round the burger joint with a board under his arm, the look that involves sandy hair and the particular tan that fair skin gets.

 

Heath Ledger is from Perth. What would he be doing if he wasn't a film star? "I don't know," he mumbles. "Probably would have done very little. Sat on the beach." He may be working hard, but he still likes to talk lazy.

 

Nobody at the Venice Film Festival where I meet him believes this, of course. Because, incredibly, Heath Ledger features in no fewer than three of the top-billing films: Terry Gilliam's Brothers Grimm, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain and Lasse Hallstrom's Casanova. Three films in one of the biggest festivals in the world, people keep exclaiming.

 

How does that feel? "It's an honour, but it's strenuous. I'm exhausted," he says, sitting down to yet another interview. He proffers a bottle of red, but no sane journalist drinks in the middle of a packed afternoon. "Ah," he says, with an automatic smile, pouring for himself. "It's half past wine for me." You need strength to be famous.

 

In fact, he says a little later, he has made five films over the past 18 months. Quite consciously, he has been hammering it: this has been a career makeover.

 

"It was a need to finally test myself, to prove myself," he says. "In the past, I suppose I felt I was kind of handed a career. I was given these silly movies; they put my face on posters and pressure on my shoulders."

 

He probably means films such as the Shakespearean high-school confidential 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) or the wassailing The Knight's Tale (2001) - though, it has to be said, most actors have much nastier paintings in the attic than does Ledger.

 

Perhaps it is the lingering spectre of Home and Away, the soap that made him familiar. His great fear, anyway, was that the roles he had done meant that he would be forever typecast as a teen hunk.

It's not that he regrets that career; that would be pointless. "If you take just one tiny thing out of your past, I believe it will change the position of everything else," he says. "So I try not to have any regrets in life, certainly not about the movies I've made."

 

But it was not a career he had chosen either, and certainly not one he felt he had earned. "I hadn't done anything. I hadn't done anything to prove myself, anyway. So over the past four years I've been destroying the career that was handed to me and creating one that I've chosen. One that I feel I've deserved."

 

It's a career that is, you can't help noting, becoming increasingly arty. He made a big impact as a racist young hayseed in Monster's Ball (2001), for example, but he says the turning point was Ned Kelly, made in 2003 by Gregor Jordan. The film flopped. But it was different, he says, "from the point of view that I'd chosen to do it and the level of enthusiasm I brought to it. And from that character, I tried to throw myself around the world."

 

That much is true: Brothers Grimm, set in southern Germany, was made in Prague; the rompin', stompin' Casanova was shot in the great lover's native Venice; Brokeback Mountain was filmed in Canada, masquerading as Wyoming.

 

It is this last film, in which he plays a cowboy almost wordlessly in love with his fellow drover, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, that we really see what Heath Ledger can do. Gruff, restrained, yet visibly boiling with the pain of thwarted love, he gives a performance widely tipped for an Oscar. This festival really is Heath's new dawn.

 

The thing is, when he started acting, he only stumbled into it. "My sister did amateur theatre and did a couple of little guest appearances on TV shows," he says. "And then her agent picked me up.

 

I was doing high school theatre, stuff like that, and then suddenly I got a TV role and that was it. Doors started opening."

 

But before my first job, I had no interest in movies. I'd never watched them, nor did I really care about them. My curiosity for film is something that has grown over the years while making them. I never woke up as a kid thinking I was going to be an actor."

 

His choices are still fairly random. "I don't like to put too much forward planning into it, into the type of role I'm looking for. I like it just to land in my lap. It feels right if it drops from the sky."

 

If he thought his career was sorted, he says, he would panic. "I wouldn't be able to sit here talking to you."

 

Besides, he bores very easily, so he has to keep it all moving. "I don't want to settle at one style of acting or film. If I were doing the same thing I wouldn't find any reason to continue. But it helps me to evolve. Every time I do something new, it helps me to mature as a performer and a person."

 

For Casanova, the ostensible topic of this particular interview, he says he did a lot of research, reading as many of the journals as he could, before he realised the film was going to be a sort of bedroom comedy with gondolas but very little historical veracity at all.

 

"I threw it all out of the window," he says. "It's a romp, a comedy. I feel I should have sent him up more; I really wanted to go to town and I feel like I missed that boat."

 

There is a hint, here, of overbearing interest from Disney, the studio that produced the movie; whoops, he has said too much. "I really shouldn't," he mumbles, then laughs uproariously as a helicopter roars above the roof of the grand Hotel des Bains garden where we are sitting. Luckily for him, it is impossible for him to finish that sentence.

 

He looks to the sky for further helicopters a few times during our interview, whenever he feels he is being put on the spot. He has little to fear, however. Only one aspect of Heath Ledger's life has been judged worthy of gossip: his two-year romance with that other Australian made good in Hollywood, Naomi Watts. They met on Ned Kelly, went out, broke up, got back together, broke up again. She was, titillatingly, 11 years his senior; they both looked fabulous. It was a match made in magazine heaven.

 

They split finally in April last year, however. For the past 12 months he has lived with the American actress Michelle Williams, who plays his wife in Brokeback Mountain. If this year is as golden for him as every one says, he says, it is mostly so because it has made him a father; his daughter Matilda was born on October 28. "That puts all those films into the pale," he says.