Heath Ledger’s hair is cropped short, he wears a sleeveless shirt that shows off the tattoos rippling on his muscles and he talks low and slow. A beer is swigged, straight from the bottle. The image is simple: All Aussie, All Man. To hammer home the point, he has enjoyed romances with the likes of Naomi Watts and Heather Graham. So, when Ledger was offered the role of a homophobic cowboy who has a long-running love affair with another man, he could think only of a two-word response. Why me? Even now, the 26-year-old actor seems uncertain as to his thoughts and motives for accepting a role in Brokeback Mountain, directed by the Oscar-winning Ang Lee. “All I could think was that it was the best script I’d ever been offered,” he says. “Apart from that, it put the fear of God into me.” The screenplay, from a short story by E Annie Proulx first published in The New Yorker, had been knocking around Hollywood for seven years. Everyone who read it agreed it was an emotional love story, but nobody had risked putting it on the screen. Even Lee, with his glittering record — Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — was not attracting the interest of the big studios. It was going to be a small-budget project.
Ledger, who never actually met Lee before filming started, was told that his on-screen lover would be the equally heterosexual Jake Gyllenhaal. “It was not the kind of thing I was going to ask my agent to get for me,” he reflects. “I looked at the story and thought, ‘Never mind the sex — how am I going to look into Jake’s eyes convincingly, with love?’ That was going to be a huge challenge.” He did not have time to think or weigh the consequences. He just agreed to go ahead. “The complexity of the character, in the end, made me want to take this chance,” he says.
It may deliver a best-actor Oscar to Ledger next February. He has produced arguably the best performance by any man this year — and there are some strong contenders, including Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote and Gyllenhaal in the Gulf-war film Jarhead — which places Ledger, suddenly and spectacularly, in another league. Many of those who read Proulx’s story, which was included in her 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, confess they shed tears. Previews of the film have had the same effect. For Ledger, who has appeared in The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale, Monster’s Ball, The Four Feathers and Ned Kelly, this is a new experience.
He plays a taciturn ranch hand, Ennis Del Mar, who, in 1963 is hired alongside Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist, a struggling rodeo rider, to look after cattle up on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. By sharing 24-hour shifts with the herd in all weathers, they forge an unexpected friendship. Then Jack seduces his reluctant partner, and so begins a lifelong secret relationship that takes them both through marriage and fatherhood. Ennis, who stays on in Wyoming, falls in love despite his strong anti-homosexual views. When the two men part after their summer on the mountain, he is so devastated, he is physically sick.
During the coming years, however, he marries Alma (Michelle Williams) and has two daughters. While they eke out a living, Jack marries a pampered rodeo queen, Lureen (Anne Hathaway), back in his native Texas. He lives a life of comparative comfort, as his wife’s father is a rich businessman who offers him work. After four years apart, the two men meet again. They realise they are meant for a passionate and loving relationship, but they are too embroiled in their lives and fear the consequences of being discovered. Instead, they continue to meet for “fishing trips” throughout the next 20 years. Lee’s leisurely pace follows their workaday lives, with plunges into despair, particularly as Jack urges his secret lover to throw convention aside so they can set up home together. The gruff Ennis, a man of few words, feels this is a step too far. So they continue their hidden relationship until fate takes over. A scene in which a much older Ennis is told by his 19-year-old daughter, Alma Jr (Kate Mara), that she is getting married is probably worth the price of a cinema ticket. It is film acting at its best.
“I was fascinated with how Ennis was struggling with his own views and personal emotions,” says Ledger. “I have read a lot of scripts about love and, quite honestly, we have seen them and heard them all before. But this was a beautiful, complex story — and a true story of love. I am just hoping audiences will come along and think, ‘We have not seen anything like this before.’ That is what I was trying to achieve. And I feel, when I really think about it, that is why I became involved in the first place. The risk, for me, was not in playing Ennis, it was in turning the role down.”
The possibility of being laughed off screen also haunted him, particularly as the film was referred to by cynics as Bareback Mounting or Brokedown Mountain. “I knew I had to age convincingly,” he says. “I relied on hair and make-up, dropping my voice and a few movements. But it was not easy. Working with Ang Lee, in the hardest conditions — and God, it was cold and bleak up there — made me feel like years were going past, rather than months.” But Ledger knows the film has changed his life. He was the talk of the Venice film festival, with two other films on show there besides Brokeback — The Brothers Grimm and the forthcoming Casanova. He was the best-reviewed actor in town.
His private life has taken a unusual turn, too. He began an off-screen relationship with his on-screen wife in Brokeback, 25-year-old Michelle Williams, and she gave birth to their daughter, Matilda, in October. He has a sense of humour about the fact that he was having sex with Gyllenhaal by day and Williams by night. “The whole thing was astonishing,” he smiles. “My relationship with Michelle was something that slowly fell into place. Falling in love with her had nothing to do with the environment or the subject matter of the film. We were just like two peas in a pod. And fatherhood? It is wonderful to feel the profound changes it will make in my life and my beliefs. There are no plans for marriage, yet. But I could not be more excited or happier.”
Such talk clearly does not come easily to Ledger. He’s not one of those people who find discussing their private life a breeze. A few months before our meeting, he had given an interview to an Australian news channel, during which he was determined to talk about Williams as little as possible. He managed to conduct the talk while eating an orange. “It was the worst thing I could have done,” he now reflects. “When it was aired, on the morning TV show, they had people calling in asking, ‘Who does he think he is? He’s not Nicole Kidman. He should get off his high horse.’
“Then, the next day, they had oranges on the show and were chucking them around, saying I could stick an orange up my... you know what. So I wrote a letter of apology, explaining I was doing a lot of back-to-back TV interviews that day and just reached for some fruit. I had them read it out on air. I went from zero to hero. The audience reaction was, ‘That nice Heath must have a good family, and he is well brought up. We love him — isn’t he a great actor?’” The lesson to be learnt? “Australians are the world’s greatest at cutting you down to size, and I’d better not forget it,” he says. “I just have to remember not to take myself too seriously.”
Ledger lives up to his own Aussie rules on that score. He laughs at himself as he points to a tattoo on his left wrist, which spells KAOS. “It stands for my sisters — Kate, Ashleigh and Olivia — plus my mum, Sally,” he says. “I like to think they stop my own life from falling into chaos. Then I had this (a rope effect) added when I was in Melbourne, doing Ned Kelly.” There is another tattoo, which says Old Man River — “I feel like old man river now” — and another, the Canadian symbol of a maple leaf, on his right hand. “That is a personal reminder of something,” he says vaguely. “When you travel around, you collect memories.”
Ledger has certainly travelled far from his home in Perth. At 17, he crossed 2,000 miles of Australian desert with a friend, in a car, to set up home in Sydney and try to find work as an actor. “It only took a few months — but that’s still a long time when you’re living on nothing,” he says.
“I was just about getting by, staying with friends.” After a couple of television roles, including playing Scott Irwin in Home and Away, he landed a part in a medieval drama called Roar, as a Celtic warrior prince. It helped him win a cult following in America and a breakthrough role in the 1999 teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You.
“After that, I was just offered a load of teen film stuff,” he reports. “I was living in LA and having so much fun. It was summer, I was living with a girlfriend and some Australian friends in Laurel Canyon, and we did nothing. We spent days on the beach. But I didn’t want to do the obvious and try the easy stuff on screen. I was on at my agent to try to take me to the next level, ignoring all the teen scripts.”
The agent finally lined him up for an interview on The Patriot, for a role alongside Mel Gibson. “By that time, I’d had it,” he says. “I said, ‘Look, if this does not happen, I am just going home. I may as well be with my friends and family in Australia, enjoying life.’” Even during the audition, he decided he’d had enough. “I was halfway through the reading and said, ‘Oh, f*** it. I am not going to carry on.’ I was basically saying to these guys that I was quitting. Maybe that helped me get the job — I just don’t know.”
Ledger has never had to look for work since. But the words tumble, with a firm-jawed determination, as he says: “I had no expectations. My only ambition was to improve myself. I will never be satisfied with my position in this industry. I never want to be. You have to be a particular type of person to be self-satisfied. I am just not that type. I do not want to be settled on one opinion, one path and one way of life. I want to evolve, expand and go deeper within myself.”
He has certainly achieved his aim.
Brokeback Mountain opens on Jan 6, Casanova on Feb 17
