Heath Ledger’s Lonesome Trail: The Rolling Stone Interview
This story originally appeared in the March 23rd, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone.
When actors become movie stars, it puts a strain on everybody. Family members get phone-called with no adjustment for the time difference; paparazzi stake out a fresh address; the rest of us lift our eyes to another personality we’re obliged to have an opinion about. This is a drag for Heath Ledger, who is twenty-six and has learned to keep his personality locked in the house – where it whines at doors, tears up furniture, gets into the yard at just the worst moments. “In the past,” he says, “I’ve tried so hard to withhold myself – even down to giving a smile.” The actor, who is Australian, speaks with a commonwealth 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 comes from a sad musical, and 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.”
And sometimes the dog gets loose. When we meet, Ledger discusses a rough moment: Williams, playing his unlucky wife, slips to a doorway in find Ledger in an embrace with co-star Jake Gyllenhaal. In a tight shot, you see her see her face cloud over: Williams understands she’ll never make the man she loves happy. Ledger wants to hear about audience response. I say they gasped. Ledger takes this in. “Yeah,” he says. “Her poor character. Michelle played it so well – just that look on her lace.” He shrugs. “Every time I see it, I can’t help but laugh.”
It’s months later, and everything has changed. David Letterman is doing the top ten signs of being a gay cowboy. Brokeback has become a cultural moment, a film to take sides about, the toll charge for entering the national conversation. Ledger arrived in Hollywood as a flyaway figure. Now he’s receiving the media attention that usually goes to kids in wells. Oscar bowed deepest this year to Brokeback Mountain, crowning Ledger with his first nomination as Best Actor. Ledger retains his physical size and shape: in every other aspect, he’s becoming larger.
Ennis Del Mar is Ledger’s starmaker 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. Last August, when he disliked an Australian interviewer’s questions, he clammed up, peeled an orange on live TV. So when he wants to meet for lunch in New York, my canny move is to dress like him. When I arrive at a tidy New York espresso bar in shorts, T-shirt, crapped-up jacket. Ledger’s eyes drift right past me. “Wouldn’t have picked you for a journalist,” he says. “Which is good.”
The Lord gave Ledger marketable looks – a Connery brow and jawline, framing a mouth peaked for kisses – but lots of days he looks like he woke up inside an oil drum. He has the handsome star’s mixed feelings: It’s the invitation that gets you through the door, which you ditch in a flowerpot once inside the party. He’s got a zip-up hoodie that says Brooklyn, black earrings, wispy goatee, wraparound sunglasses he never once removes, Frankenstein boots.
Ledger clomps us into an Australian restaurant, where he becomes all slouch, wit and charm. He doesn’t put stock in the nice word around his performance. “It’s a relief,” he says. “But I’ve had people say it” – he laughs – “about a lot of really bad films I’ve done.” He’s shrewd about work – and generally, when actors dip into shop talk, you wish they’d get onto something interesting, like photocopier repair. “I’m always gonna pull myself apart and dissect it. I mean, there’s no such thing as perfection in what we do. Pornos are more perfect than we are, because they’re actually fucking.” He’s not a fastidious eater – there’s finger-sucking, a belch, an “excuse me.” Throughout, he retains something slyly mocking, a driver submitting to the roadside breathalyzer 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. The check arrives, Ledger goes for his wallet; I assure him I’ve got it. “Good, because I’ve only got, like, two dollars.” If I hadn’t brought cash? “Then we’d be fucked.” he says. “We’d be back there doing the dishes.”