Breaking Camp
After subverting the macho image of cowboys in Ang Lee's latest movie, Heath Ledger is back in Australia enjoying being a father to 11-week-old Matilda.

By Larry Schwartz
January 11, 2006


"IT'S not an epidemic. It's not a plague. It's not a disease of some sort. The level of intimacy and the level of love they experience is the same that we would experience as heterosexual people … And their love does transcend all."

Heath Ledger hopes his role as "a homophobic man in love with another man" in the award-winning new cowboy film Brokeback Mountain will help deepen the audience's understanding of homosexuality.

He's amused to hear of condemnation by cowboys in Wyoming, where it is partly set, including one man's fears that "they've gone and killed John Wayne with this movie".

"They're actually missing the point," says Ledger, an affable contrast to his taut and tight-lipped ranch-hand Ennis Del Mar, who falls in love with rodeo cowboy Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, in the summer of 1963.

In Melbourne with actor Michelle Williams and their 11-week-old baby, Matilda, for last night's Australian premiere at the Rivoli in Camberwell and a friend's wedding, he says that except on Chapel Street, Prahran, "I've always felt very comfortable walking around".

He and Williams met on the set of director Ang Lee's movie, which last night won three US Critics' Choice awards including best picture and best director. She plays his wife, Alma, in a marriage troubled by his intermittent affair with Jack Twist.

"I just have two of the most beautiful girls in the world and every day I fall deeper and deeper in love," he says of Williams and daughter Matilda. "I didn't work for the whole nine months. So I've been able to cook and clean and be her chauffeur and keep her comfortable and relaxed and we had a wonderful pregnancy and a wonderful birth and equally supported each other through this part, too. It's miraculous."

He has said that it was "certainly a surreal moment the first time I had to kiss Jake". But Ledger, who later returned to Australia to act in Neil Armfield's Candy, had no hesitation playing a gay man and subverting the iconic macho cowboy image in the film, which is based on a short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx with a screenplay co-written by another Pulitzer winner, Larry McMurtry.

"I think had I looked ahead and worried about people's opinions or how people are going to judge the film or me, it would just have bled into my choices in front of the camera," he says.

His portrayal of the tormented cowboy so impressed Proulx she recently said he "erased the image I had when I wrote it".

Ledger says he "wanted him (Del Mar) to be a clenched fist".

"I think violence is the one form of expression that he allows himself … He is in fact battling his genetic structure. He is battling the fears and traditions that had been passed down to him from his father, his father's father. They were heavily embedded in him. That ultimately defeats his ability to ever love and express."

Ledger has been tipped as a likely Academy Award-winner. [size=4][i]"It's bizarre," he says. "I'm obviously grateful and proud to be in a movie that's being well-received. But … I really find it hard to comprehend how you judge one performance against another, or one film against another, because ultimately we're all starting the race from different points and we're not ending at the same finish line … So how do you compete?"

Brokeback Mountain screens from January 26. (In Australia)




*Mr. Ledger's opinions do not necessarily represent the opinions of HeathHeathens or its Administration.