Previous Roles Led Ledger to 'Brokeback Mountain'

By BETSY PICKLE
Scripps Howard News Service
04-JAN-06

Heath Ledger has ridden horses, fallen in love and faced deep tragedy. So taking on the role of a man who does all three at once in "Brokeback Mountain" made him an easy choice.

"It felt like a story that hadn't been told, which is rare," says Ledger, who adds the script "left a lump" in his throat. "It felt perfect, and there was a seemingly perfect director (Ang Lee) attached to it also, so I thought I'd be crazy to walk away from it."

"Brokeback Mountain," which has been in limited release and goes into wide release Jan. 6, tells the story of a ranch hand (Ledger) and a rodeo cowboy (Jake Gyllenhaal) who meet and fall in love in summer 1963 while herding sheep in the high-country pastures of Wyoming and then spend two decades in anguish as they conform to societal expectations. The movie has been eliciting excitement and snickers since it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September.

The excitement has come from Oscar watchers and film critics _ seven U.S. critics groups named it the best film of 2005 _ and viewers in major cities, who helped it set box-office records for the highest per-screen average of any 2005 film when it debuted in limited release in December. The snickers have come from talk-show hosts, comedians and DJs who've preyed on mainstream America's supposed homophobia with a steady barrage of gay-cowboy jokes.

Ledger, however, was excited about playing taciturn Ennis Del Mar when he read the script, adapted by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and novelist Larry McMurtry ("The Last Picture Show") and Diana Ossana from a short story by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx. The star of such crowd-pleasers as "A Knight's Tale," "10 Things I Hate About You" and "The Patriot" says his managers never tried to steer him away from playing a gay character.

"The script was packaged with fears and anxieties, which seemed fairly manufactured by, I think, mainly the studios and the people wanting to put up money," he tells reporters in an interview at a Park Avenue hotel. "I never personally felt like I had a career at risk."

Except for the 2001 art-house hit "Monster's Ball," Ledger's recent films _ including "The Brothers Grimm," "The Order" and "Four Feathers" _ have tanked, so "I didn't know what I had at stake anyway," he says. "I'm kind of willing to be a little ruthless with it. If anything, it felt like an opportunity for me to mature as a person and an actor, which is what I'm looking for."

The 26-year-old Australian, who now lives in Brooklyn with "Brokeback" co-star Michelle Williams (who gave birth to their baby, Matilda, in October), says he never intended to court controversy by doing the film.

"It's obviously not really that controversial to me; otherwise, I wouldn't have done it," Ledger says. "I think it's unfortunate that it is. We certainly didn't make it to raise any eyebrows."

Many gays have embraced the film before even seeing it because it addresses a repressive experience that strikes a universal chord. But Ledger hesitates to describe "Brokeback Mountain" as a gay love story.

"It's a very touchy subject because if I say, 'Well no, it isn't,' there'll be a lot of people who go, 'Hang on, it is _ we want it to be,'" he says. "I wanted my particular character ... whether you want to label him gay or not ... (is) just a human being and his soul falling in love with another soul, and it just happened to be in the vessel of a man.

"And I think that was the point of Annie Proulx borrowing this masculine, western iconic figure and landscape _ it's because it's so masculine. We wanted to show that it exists in all forms. It's for that reason Ennis has to be as masculine as he was."

(Betsy Pickle of The Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee)