Heath Ledger:

Lonesome Cowboy

Excerpt from: Rolling Stone Magazine

Issue:  March 2006

When actors become movie stars, it puts a strain on everybody. Family members are phoned with no consideration for the time difference; paparazzi stake out a fresh address. This is a pain for Heath Ledger, who at 26 has learned to keep his personality locked in the house. 'In the past,' he says, 'I've tried so hard to withhold myself - even down to giving a smile.' The actor speaks with an Australian accent that's both arch and street. 'I didn't want to be people's opinions of who I am or what I said,' he says. One day, his girlfriend, Michelle Williams, wrote a song title, 'Old Man River', on his forearm. Ledger got a tattoo artist to run the needles over her words, the way a shopkeeper will frame his first dollar. The song contains this key advice: 'He must know somethin', he don't say nothin.' So last summer, when the couple first saw Brokeback Mountain - sitting in one of the poker-faced office towers of Manhattan - it should have been perfect: no people, no opinions. The room went dark. Ledger rides a horse, falls in love with another man, breaks his heart, misses out on the chance of his life. The lights came up, Ledger and Williams moved through the lobby. And Ledger had no idea what he'd just seen. 'I understood that it flowed, it was presented well. But whether it was good, whether it was bad - we walked out not knowing what we'd just watched.'

Ennis Del Mar is Ledger's star-maker role, and if you strip off the coating, he's done it the old-fashioned way. It's the part Robert Redford made a career out of in The Way We Were: the love object who doesn't want to be loved, who flickers out of reach. His approach to being interviewed is not dissimilar. For Ledger, reporters are the sadistic border guards of a country he must pass through. So when he wants to meet for lunch in New York, my move is to dress like him. When I arrive at a tidy New York espresso bar in T-shirt and messed-up jacket, Ledger's eyes drift right past me. 'Wouldn't have picked you for a journalist,' he says. 'Which is good.'

Ledger clomps us into an Australian restaurant where he becomes all slouch, wit and charm. He doesn't put stock in the nice words around his performance. 'It's a relief,' he laughs, 'but I've had people say it about a lot of really bad films I've done.' Throughout, he retains something slyly mocking, a driver submitting to the roadside breathalyser when he knows he hasn't been near a drink. And though Ledger makes the crazy money actors make, he doesn't throw it around. Later, when the bill arrives, he goes for his wallet: I assure him I've got it. 'Good, because I've only got, like, $2.' If I hadn't brought cash? 'Then we'd be fucked,' he says. 'We'd be back there doing the dishes.'

Ledger did not grow up with money - 'or movies, or art', he says. Like a million families: solid middle-class parents (Kim designed racing cars, Sally kept the home) with a couple of kids, riding out a problem marriage. This was in Perth, Western Australia - Ledger calls it 'the most isolated city in the world'. He was 11 when his parents finally divorced. 'I'm sure there was, like, one week where they didn't speak to each other.' Otherwise, they became the kind of ex-couple who share family dinners and trips. For Ledger, the divorce provided a lifestyle boot camp: 'I enjoyed being at one house for three weeks, then going, "OK, right, I'm off." It set me up for this bohemian life I've been leading - I feel like I've been travelling with the same bag since I was 11.'

At the same time, Ledger split with the child he'd been. 'Every kid up to age 13 thinks they are their parents, basically,' he says. His father had manly, family-line ambitions: Ledger would race cars ('I was prepped to be the next Michael Schumacher'). Instead, he stepped into the drama department.

Ledger had an advantage: he already looked like Heath Ledger - golden hair, bold features. His older sister was making feints toward an acting career. Ledger met her agent, and walked out with an audition. 'I started to realise that acting was gonna give me more money and more time off,' he says. 'I didn't really give a shit. I was still pretty caught up in just being a teenager.'

Ledger's first big role was in an Australian TV series called Sweat. Watching it for the first time, the 17-year-old was in for a shock. 'I was crap,' he says. 'I remember burying my face in my hands, thinking, "This is the end, it hasn't even begun.'"

He enlisted his mother on a reassurance mission: he was really terrible in the show, wasn't he? 'And she just said, "Well, that's OK." The honesty kind of slipped out of her, in the most beautiful way. She didn't even bother with "No, honey, you were great, I'm so proud of you." No one else around you, except your mum, is going to tell you that you suck. She straight-up told me, "There are other things to do in life."'

Ledger does a rueful head shake. 'I think that's the problem with a lot of actors in the industry. We all just think we're brilliant, you know? And 98 per cent of us are crap. And we've got to realise that before we can improve.'

He began picking apart his performance the way he'd watched his dad reassemble car engines. He wasn't listening to the other actors; he wasn't connecting; he was doing way too much blinking. 'I started to make changes,' he says, 'to ... direct myself.'

Ledger decides on a walk. This being Little Italy, sedans creep by with guys in suits staring out, guys to whom Ledger is not a film star but one more invader in the old neighbourhood. I ask Ledger for a cigarette; he turns out to have quit a year ago. Why? 'I couldn't breathe properly.' He leads me to a store anyway and is bobbing and craning to get a fix on something behind the counter. 'Try those,' he says, pointing to a brand of cigarettes. 'They're buttery.'

By the late Nineties, Ledger had found his way to Los Angeles. He'd done an Australian gun movie, Two Hands. He'd starred in a Fox TV sword-and-sandals drama called Roar, which laid down its arms after 13 episodes. ('It started off quite dignified and Braveheart-esque. But as they got desperate for ratings, slowly no one's wearing clothes. I'm like, "Why is there a gang of bikini models fighting?"') He and a girlfriend lived in a shared house, the sort of place where people swap food and social contacts. Somebody knew a screenwriter dreaming up a teen comedy, 10 Things I Hate About You. Ledger played the boyfriend - after which he refused offers to play high-school bullies, loners, wooers. He stayed in the house, broke and hungry, and waited.

He turned out to be waiting for Mel Gibson. Midway through his 1999 audition to play Gibson's son in The Patriot, he'd lowered his script, told producers he was wasting their time and his: 'I am the worst auditioner in the world.'

'I almost, like, rebel against the situation. I got A Knight's Tale, without auditioning.' This was the summer epic he would carry himself. Ledger was just 19; as the film's release approached, he had a slippery feeling in his stomach. Every day, drivers could see his giant-size head on billboards along Sunset Boulevard; all across the country, his face, the title, the tagline: 'He Will Rock You.' 'It freaked me out,' he says. 'I was like, "What if I don't rock 'em?"'

As Ledger grew nervous ('I pretty much had anxiety attacks about just leaving the house') the studio turned enthusiastic. At meetings, executives mapped out a career: tours, more billboards, bigger projects - they wanted him to play Spider-Man. It made him less confident. 'I didn't feel like I deserved it,' he says. 'I didn't really know how to act properly yet. I started to feel like a bottle of Coke. There was a whole marketing scheme to turn me into a very popular bottle. And, you know, Coke tastes like shit. But there's posters everywhere so people will buy it.'

As the executives finished their presentation, every head at the table clocked toward Ledger. He stood up. 'Could you ... could you wait one second, please?' He slipped to the bathroom, slammed the door. 'And pretty much burst into tears ... I was hitting my head, hitting the walls. It was a full-on anxiety attack.'

He set about finding roles to dirty himself up: The Four Feathers, The Order, Ned Kelly. 'I wanted to take the blond out of my career, kill the direction it was going. I wanted to be bad, I wanted to be good. I was like, "How am I gonna make this a career I would like to have?"' If no audiences came, 'Good. That's gonna help me out.' But Ledger met success. 'I got to the point where it worked: nobody wanted to work with me.' He laughs. 'I'd finally - whether consciously or unconsciously - perfectly sabotaged any studio interest in working with me.'

In 1997, E Annie Proulx wrote a story about intensely filmable people (modern cowboys) getting up to something pretty unfilmable (having sex with each other). Actors had been romancing Brokeback Mountain as if it were a beautiful rancher's daughter with a drug problem. Who'd be man enough to play gay? 'My agent told me, "I think you're perfect for this one."'

It's a simple story. Ennis Del Mar falls in love with Jack Twist, then spends two decades frustrating the other man's attempts to love him at close range. Producers initially saw Ledger as Jack. He, of course, said no. 'Because unlike Jake [Gyllenhaal], who had to pretend he was comfortable, Ennis was fighting it.' After all, for years, what had Ledger been doing but Ennis Del Mar? Subtract the romance, and Ledger had been Ennis since the moment he left his dad's garage.

The film shot for four months in the mountains of Calgary, Alberta, winter melting off to a cool, stubby spring. At night, Ledger was falling in love with Michelle Williams. By day, the work with Jake. For eight weeks, the sex scenes loomed ahead of them, the motel and bedroll stuff that had seen other actors off.

'My biggest anxiety,' Ledger says, 'wasn't having to kiss Jake.' For a decade, he'd been hoping for the right part - the chance to show what he could do. 'It was a perfect script and Ang Lee was the perfect director. So the anxiety for me was - I didn't want to be the one to fuck it up.' He laughs. 'And I was willing to do anything ...

'Look, I've experienced love. I know how to love a woman - I've been in love with many women and I am in love with the most beautiful woman right now - so I know the extent of love. But part of the magic of acting is, you harness the infinite power of belief. If for a second we stopped believing, and looked into Heath and Jake's eyes, it would have been "Oh, God. OK. Hmm. This is ..."'

His eyes move away, then back to me. 'You know when you see the preachers down south? And they grab a believer and they go, "Bwoom! I touch you with the hand of God!" And they believe so strongly, they're on the ground shaking and spitting. That's the power of belief.' He shakes his head. 'Now, I don't believe in Jesus, but I believe in my performance. And if you can understand that the power of belief is one of the great tools of our time and that a lot of acting comes from it, you can do anything.'

Ledger stands, asks the time, nods. 'I've gotta get back to my girl. Girls.' In October, Michelle Williams gave birth to the couple's daughter: Matilda Rose. Ledger jokes that he's carrying 25 extra pounds of sympathy weight. 'Don't want to be away too long. I've gotta keep the house clean, my girls fed. I've got duties.'

Heading down the sidewalk to his motorcycle, he asks, 'How many more questions you got? Do you maybe want to come out to Brooklyn in the next few days - we'll grab a few beers, go for a walk.'

As weeks pass, it's clear: I've been Ennis-ed. There's no call to Brooklyn. So in the interim, I speak with Annie Proulx, who wrote the story Brokeback Mountain. She has won a Pulitzer Prize and speaks in a voice that's small and precise as a granite chip. 'Heath understood the character better than I did,' she says. 'It scared me how much he got inside Ennis.'

And I call Ang Lee. Lee knew the picture simply could not work if Ennis wasn't right: 'He anchors the movie.' During production, Lee watched the actor become a star. 'You spend so much money to make movies and usually it rests on a face or two,' Lee says. 'The audience identifies with themselves, with human faces. You need good actors. But you also need the image to carry the movie - and that's the movie star. I think Heath is both. I didn't know for sure before. After this movie, I hope people will want to bet their movie on him.'

Lee saw the backstage romance (Ledger falling for Williams) as a good thing. 'On the set, I push him toward Jake,' he says, 'and off the set he has this great escape the other way.' The director is pleased for the couple. 'The baby keeps staring at me. Michelle said she doesn't usually stare at people like that. I said maybe she remembers I am the reason she came into existence.'

When I speak with Ledger again, we're on the phone. It's a few weeks later. His voice is backed by clucking people and shutting doors. 'We've got Michelle's parents - Michelle's mum and, um, her boyfriend - and Michelle's sister is in town. So we're all running around frantically here. I'm kind of pulling the tired father card.'

The phone offers one consolation. When I ask about his former girlfriends, there's less chance of Ledger throwing a fit. He has dated Heather Graham and Naomi Watts, and like any sensible human being I'm interested in hearing about it.

'Well, I don't ...' Ledger begins. 'I'd honestly, out of respect for both Naomi and Michelle, I really would rather not dive into the past.' Which is about as sporting a demur as you're going to get. For the record, he dated Graham for less than a year, when he was 22 and she was just past 30. He dated Watts for nearly two years - she was 35, he 25 - with a one-month breather in the middle. She described their break-up as sad and inevitable: 'I think deep down we both knew there wasn't a forever plan.'

But then Ledger gives the particulars on how he met Williams, 25, who's still probably best known as Jen, the girl with the darkest backstory on TV's Dawson's Creek. It was the first day of shooting. 'We were knee-deep in snow,' he says. 'And on the fifth take, Michelle and I tobogganing down the hill, we were supposed to fall off, having a fun time, ho ho ho. And Michelle was screaming in pain. And I thought she's acting: ha ha ha. "No, I'm really in pain." She'd twisted her knee - she was pretty much on crutches for the rest of the shoot.' Ledger thinks it over. 'And I felt I always had to look after her after that.'

They never made a firm decision about having kids: 'We just fell very deeply into one another's arms. Our bodies definitely made those decisions for us ...' They conceived outside Sydney, in a resort called Byron Bay, a place favoured by surfers and travellers seeking enlightenment. 'It's very romantic,' he says. 'It's very spiritual. There are a lot of hippies out there.'

After Williams gave birth, the Brooklyn neighbours started turning up with casserole dishes. 'It was very sweet,' says Ledger. 'I made a big feast for them, we got to know each other.'

Right now, career decisions are on hold. Candy, the Aussie film in which he plays a heroin addict, opens in the US in April. Then what? 'I've had a year off,' he says. 'If my agent had his way, I'd be working every day of my life.' He's being careful. 'Because in this industry, interest in you comes in waves, it's so tidal. And so I don't really want to jump on the first wave that comes along.'

Awards season has ended now. The system, which Ledger calls 'the monster', follows the political model; you've got to go campaigning. For Ledger it has been a tough trail. He wins the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor, but doesn't show up to collect the prize. He delivers a speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards that seems to mock Brokeback's content. But if you know Ledger, what he's making fun of is the award speech genre itself. Then he announces that George Clooney deserves the same Best Supporting Actor award that Jake Gyllenhaal is nominated for. Word circulates that Ledger is a bad boy - not, perhaps, in the good way voters like. But all of this is honourable. Many stars pocket the benefits of saying they're rebellious, claiming they dislike the system, at no cost to themselves. (He misses out on the Oscar to Philip Seymour Hoffman.) Ledger really seems not to know any way to act but as himself - he's still playing to his own standard of prickly honesty. I remember the last thing he said on the phone: 'It's not that hard to understand, right? I'd like to be responsible for my own actions. If you're gonna paint a picture, you want to pick the colours yourself, and where and how they go.'