Rocky Mountain News
Denerstein: Heartthrob Ledger climbs a 'Mountain' with gay role
December 10, 2005

The Australian-born Heath Ledger has been a known commodity in Hollywood for half a decade, but he hasn't exactly stormed the A-list. During the past few years, Ledger's stock has been in decline, partly because of box-office and critical flops such as Ned Kelly, Four Feathers and The Order.

Then came a supporting role as a stoned-out surfer in Lords of Dogtown. Ledger virtually disappeared inside his portrayal of a man who sponsored skateboard teams. Dogtown was followed by a less ballyhooed performance in Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm.

But it wasn't until Brokeback Mountain began showing on the fall festival circuit that Ledger, 26, started turning heads again, even generating talk about an Oscar nomination.

In Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee, Ledger portrays Ennis Del Mar, a gay cowboy who in 1963 begins a lifelong affair with another gay ranch hand, Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist. Both men marry; neither really knows how to handle his homosexuality.

In Lee's hands, the movie - an elaboration on an Annie Proulx short story by screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana - becomes a meditation on manhood and lost romantic love.

At the Toronto International Film Festival, Ledger talked about his recent film successes in terms that seemed genuinely modest.

"I never went to acting school or had any classes. . . . All of my mistakes are on film. In other words, it's been a long, slow process in discovering how to act, and I'm still figuring it out. I guess in the past I never felt like I was ready. I never felt like I deserved the career that was somewhat handed to me on a platter at an early age."

At some point, Ledger decided he'd have to unleash a lot of stuff that was building inside him. He adopted a "go-for-it" ethos, which, for an actor, means a lot of difficult work.

"I didn't want to take the shortcut route," he said. "I wanted to take the route where I had to struggle a little. In doing so, you mature as a person. When you mature as a person, you mature as an actor. It goes hand in hand. In the last couple of years, I wanted to pull out all of the stuff that was locked inside of me and go for it."

In the case of Brokeback Mountain, Ledger could "go for it" only by holding back, almost building a wall around his character and using what director Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Sense and Sensibility) saw as the actor's brooding vulnerability.

Those who see Brokeback Mountain, which opens in Denver on Friday at the Mayan, will discover a performance from Ledger that ranks among the year's best.

"I wanted to find out what Ennis was battling inside," Ledger said of his character. "The conclusion I came to is that he was battling his genetic structure. He was fighting the traditions and values and fears and ideals that had been passed down to him through his father."

The questions came fast and furious. How would Ennis hold his body? How would being on a horse all day change his posture.

"Also, what does being trapped (gay man in a superstraight world) do to your voice. Your voice must have a battle of its own," said Ledger. "Each word has to kind of punch its way out, to fight its way out. Expression is a fight for Ennis.

"I wanted to try to find a voice for him, a way of moving his mouth. I wanted sounds to be too loud for him, the lights to be too bright for him. Any form of expression was overload. You find all that stuff and (the performance) falls into place."

But Ennis is more than a repressed man: He's a repressed westerner.

"Then, of course, there's the stillness," Ledger said. "I think that's a real trait in anyone who spends a lot of time isolated out in the middle of mother nature, the Rocky Mountains. You become a product of your environment. I wanted Ennis to blend into his environment. I wanted him to be a rock."

As you can probably tell, Brokeback Mountain relies on a provocative contrast. Ennis and Jack may be gay, but their speech, behavior and attitudes are pure cowboy. And by the end of the movie, Ennis has evoked a harsh code of the silent suffering: If you can't fix it, you have to stand it.

"That was kind of the point," said Ledger. "I wanted to create the most masculine character I'd played to date, but love transcends all shapes and sizes. I had a dear friend of mine, who's my uncle. He's the head of the Australian arm-wrestling federation. He's a big guy. He goes to bare-knuckle fighting out in the Nevada desert, and he's gay. I think sometimes that (the toughness) can be a direct compensation for the way we all perceive them. It's overcompensating.

"I don't think (Brokeback Mountain) is a story about overcompensation. It's just the way these guys are. Ranch hands are fairly rugged people. It just happens to be that two souls within these vessels fall in love."

Say what you will, it takes guts for a heartthrob actor to play a gay man.

"I definitely knew it was going to take courage, but that was what was alluring about the project for me," Ledger said. "I knew it would be rewarding in terms of what I'd learn about acting. It's so easy in this industry to keep playing safe and do stuff that doesn't test you. You can sit on a plateau and do the easy stuff."

Working with Lee on an emotionally challenging movie certainly doesn't qualify as "the easy stuff."

"It felt like we were all in the same position," Ledger said. "I'm an Australian telling an American story, playing a ranch hand from Wyoming. Ang is obviously an outsider to American culture as well. He didn't grow up here. (Lee grew up in Taiwan.) He had to investigate, to discover the story. It wasn't coming from within him.

"He's a tough man to work for. He's very shy on compliments. You always walk away at the end of the day feeling like you underachieved, and so you want to come back the next day and push it to a higher level."

For the record, Ledger lives with actress Michelle Williams, who plays Ennis' wife in the movie. They met while shooting in the Canadian Rockies and recently had a daughter, Matilda. In his next movie, Casanova, he plays the legendary womanizer, but when Brokeback Mountain was filming, he had to spend long hours making love to a man.

"Look," he said, "the story was hard to pass. The director was hard to pass. . . . (The sex scenes), at the end of the day, are insignificant in comparison with the actual story, which is a story of love. But quite obviously it was something that was difficult for both Jake and me."

To do justice to Proulx's tale, Ledger said, the two actors had to harness their belief in the story and stay with it.

"If for a second we stopped and realized it was Heath and Jake, we wouldn't have been able to go through with it."

Robert Denerstein is the News' film critic.