| Australian Issue of Elle August 2001 Heath Ledger was drowning. Dumped by a wave while surfing a break up Newcastle way, the young actor found himself sinking like a man with concrete Calvins. As the surface light faded and the icy waters enfolded him, Ledger fell back into his blue tomb and waited for oblivion. But something happened on the way to heaven. "I was going, going, going," he remembers. "I'd given up, I was sinking, I was gone. But then something inside me kicked in, some hidden reserve and up I came." Maybe that something was fate. And maybe someone decreed that this lad Ledger was too young, too beautiful, and too damn talented to die. This world wasn't finished with Heath Ledger yet. Not by a long way. Five years, five very large films and many celebrity moons later, Ledger is drowning once again--only this time it's his sorrows, railing against the surface world he inhabits and how the clutches of Hollywood are nowhere near as welcoming as those of the cruel sea all those years ago. Nursing a pint of Stella Artois and sucking down smokes at a swank Sydney hotel bar, the 22-year-old Perth kid come good is doing his darnedest to disguise the fact he's happy to be home. The star of Two Hands, TTIHAY, the Patriot, AKT and the upcoming FF may follow the Sydney Swans via video but he does so from a recently acquired Los Angeles bungalow. He says he wants to live here but work there so this trip is a test of whether the twain shall ever meet. Perhaps his diffidence--on show in a blur of cheekbones, tousled hair and rough baritone--is because my tape recorder stands between him an Heather Graham(aka Rollergirl from Boogie Nights, the wonderfully sexy wench waiting for him upstairs). More likely, though, it's the mode of his transportation to his homeland: as king of a publicity caravan for AKT... "They wanted me to do 12 major cities in the US," he whinges. "That's 12 two-day junkets with 150 journalists a day in each city and then another six weeks doing the same around the world. I had to fight to stop that and I just kept fighting and kept saying, "no." Now it's four days in the US and four days international." Power plays like this make Ledger happy. Interviews are not his favorite pasttime at the moment. Having hit the big time career and girlfriend-wise, exposure and promotion are no longer a necessity. Ledger's profile is thriving, his name lurks in households all over the globe, and his work is popular enough to ensure a high level of visibility for years to come. Projecting himself in the name of publicity is a trial. "In the end," he says, "as much as I love this film, I'm not going to become an advertising tool and whore myself for them. I can do all the press in the world and it's not going to make the movie any better--because the success of the movie doesn't depend on how people respond to me in the media. I can be the biggest c**t in the world and it won't make a lick of difference. "Nor does it matter that AKT is an ensemble movie because the success of movies these days is in finding a market niche, a sales point. For this film the 'angle' is me. They go with a poster of my face and invest $40 million so they can create a star and our film will make a lot of money. I know their game--and it's absurd." For all intents, it's not the nature of his ascent that irks Ledger, more the trappings of his present-day existence. AKT may be laden with dialogue that clanks as loud as the armour and there's less ham in the spitted pigs than in the acting, but amidst the swordfighting to Bachman Turner Overdrive and jousting to Queen, there's no doubt where the real action is. The movie's poster is accompanied by nothing more than Ledger's face and the chaser, "He will rock you". Little wonder the Subiaco "surfer bum" named in honour of the Wuthering Heights hero feels "intimidated" by the juggernaut of his own fame. Maybe it's paranoia. After all, homecomings can be difficult when you're an Australian who's become more famous overseas than here. Plainly Ledger didn't want (nor did he get) the cloying adulation of his countrymen during his jaunt in April. Instead he got keelhauled by a petty and hissing media who accused him of refusing interviews to those who had "made him." Consequently, he was saddled with a press conference filled to the gills with hackneyed probings into the "Heath and Heather " show (the pair eventually split last month amid a furious flurry of tabloid speculation and New York nightclub "sightings" of the newly single star behaving like one.) It was the very thing Ledger hoped to escape by coming home. He spent the first few days of his trip with Graham off the coast of Western Australia on Rottnest Island before returning home to kip in his old bed at mum's house and have her bake pies for him. He then hung out with his racing-car mad dad, before heading out to the Aussie Rules. But eventually, as it does when you're box-office gelignite, duty called. This time, the Aussie press gang's mercurial patriotic pride soured when their quarry adoped a "stupider the question, stupider the answer" approach. When questions about his private life were thrown up, Ledger--who since lobbing into Los Angeles in 1997 has mastered the art of deflecting inanities--squared the account by shutting down, playing it vague and retorting in kind. Hack hackles rose. Meanwhile, a none-the -wiser public could only deduce from the tainted edit images and gossip-column bitchery that because Ledger's voice had lost a little of its Strine and was inflected around the edges with a bit of Yankee drawl, and because the boy had the temerity to question why his love life needed to be public record, he was clearly "up himself." Ledger may not be self-obsessed, but he's definitely insular. "Anything to do with my private life I just shut down and you'll find out if you ask me," he told me matter of factly at the start of this interview. "As you go on, your work changes and everyone around you changes, and everyone's pushing you to change but that's only to suit their needs. My professional life is between 'action' and 'cut' , and what pains me starts with 'cut' and ends with 'publicity.' Reckless humility is a common malady that afflicts the recently famous. And to keep his ego reined, Ledger enlists an old friend, Trevor, whom he's known since he was three years old and acts as his PA on whatever film he's working on (characteristically, Ledger doesn't divulge Trevor's surname). "Trev's my best mate," he says, "and since we were 'knee-highs' we haven't spent three months apart. We're like brothers. Maybe if he wasn't there my head would expand, but as long as he doesn't change nor will I. He helps me see through a misty world. I don't need a hundred friends. I can count my friends on one hand an that's the way I want to keep it." Ledger's greatest Hollywood mentor has been another expat, Mel Gibson, whom he acted alongside in The Patriot and whose advice is clearly gospel. Ledger was even mooted as the new Mad Max in George Miller's proposed sequel. "Mel doesn't sit you down and say 'this is how it is,'" states Ledger in his enigmatic croak. "The way to learn from him is just through observation. I've learned a helluva lot from him, especially how to play it all as a big f*cking joke. Mel sees life as a big f*cking comedy that is just hurtling towards a punchline." In coming months though, Ledger's on-screen life will be far from comedic. His next film, FF, is based on AEW Mason's ripping yarn about a man accused of cowardice who redeems himself through bloody heroics in the Sudan war of the 1890s. Even though the project has been filmed five times in the last 80 years, Ledger says this was the film that tested him as an actor, a man, and a partner more than any other. "It doesn't get any more serious," he says, exhaling a long, slow stream of smoke. "Four Feathers is the most emotionally draining thing I've ever done in my life. It is pretty damn f*cking full-on. I had to go to the deepest darkest place inside myself and then come back again. It wasn't about finding darkness in my memory. It was about asking myself dark, dark questions." Ledger admits he wasn't an easy man to live with during shooting. "It was such an epic mental and physical journey that it consumed me. By the end of the day, I had very little to give Heather. All my time, all my emotions, were drained and by the time I got home I just wanted to rekindle myself for the next day." |
| Elle August 2001 from Deanna's Delusions |