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Features
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Adding Up the Hollywood Ledger
Although Heath Ledger has failed to light a box office fire with any of his leading man vehicles, the 25-year-old Australian native isn’t too worried about it.
Tuesday, August 3, 2004
By Todd Gilchrist
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For the past five years, Heath Ledger’s body of work has lived just on the outer edge of a huge commercial career. After singing his way onto the Hollywood scene in 10 Things I Hate About You, the Australian actor found himself waiting in the wings of potentially huge pictures while his A-list co-stars enjoyed the glories of fame, acclaim and financial success. In The Patriot, he played Mel Gibson’s son; his scene-stealing moments at the beginning of Monster’s Ball were overshadowed by Halle Berry’s Oscar-winning physical and emotional vulnerability.
Only in more recent roles have Ledger’s own appealing qualities taken center stage, with middling success: 2000's criminally underrated A Knight’s Tale was unfortunately overshadowed by Sony’s invention of imaginary critic David Manning, while ambitious ventures like The Four Feathers and The Order disappeared in a din of critical derision and commercial failure.
This spring’s Ned Kelly was his most recent ‘near miss,’ grossing less than $75,000 at the U.S. box office in limited release and vanishing quickly from theatres until its recent return on DVD (the film was released July 27th). The picture is yet another from his growing filmography that can be considered a ‘must see’ even if nobody actually did.
When the native Aussie recently sat down with FilmStew to discuss his fledgling career in the context of Ned Kelly and his upcoming projects The Brothers Grimm and the Ang Lee western Brokeback Mountain, he admitted that he bases his choice of roles on the diversity of their challenges rather than on any perceived blockbuster potential.
“I actually find it to be a necessity,” he says. “I didn't really like where I was headed, and I didn't really have a choice in the beginning, so it was either follow someone else's dream or stop it and follow your own.”
“It's hard and it's tough, it really is, but it's paid off. “
Ned Kelly recounts the larger-than-life legend of the eponymous Australian anti-hero, who in the late 1800s gained infamy as a bank robber. Ledger says that like most Aussies, he was well versed in Kelly lore by the time he agreed to take on the role.
“I knew enough about him from school and growing up in Australia,” Ledger explains. “He's one of our few iconic figures in history. I knew all of the basics in his life, and all the tales of him wrapping himself up in lead and taking on a hundred and fifty police.”
Still, Ledger says that Kelly’s real-life travails surprised him, and required deeper research than he expected. “I knew of the heroic version of his tale, but I guess that I never understood to what extent that he was a victim of circumstance, a victim of society you could say,” he suggests. “That wasn't too clear to me and that certainly wasn't taught to us and that's what I had to read up on and discover for myself.”
Ledger says that Kelly’s relative unfamiliarity outside Australia was both a blessing and a curse as the film expanded to a full international release. “No one gives a sh*t about Ned Kelly over here because, who is he?” Ledger asks rhetorically. “But on the good side of things, the audience will be watching it as a movie as opposed to sitting down and judging it on the true history of Ned's life.”
Indeed, the film inspired some extremely harsh criticism when it was released Down Under thanks to the strongly held and equally divided opinions about the protagonist’s colorful life. “Half of the country believes that he was a cold blooded cop killer, a horse thief that should have been hanged, and the other half of the country strongly believes that he was a hero and a victim.”
“So, there's no one way to play it to please everyone. It's always going to be divided, but with an American audience who doesn't know the life of Ned Kelly, they're watching it as a movie, and aren't as judgmental.”
Laughing about another recent flop, Ledger jokes that his limited pre-production time on Ned Kelly made building a rapport with fellow actor Orlando Bloom somewhat difficult. “I actually only had one week to meet everyone because I was doing that brilliant movie The Order in Rome,” Ledger says with a chuckle. “So I had no time really to meet anyone. I didn't even rehearse.”
Ledger says his lack of preparation for Ned Kelly left many of the film’s cast and crew wondering how he would play the legendary pistolero. “No one knew what I was going to do, what I was going to sound like, nothing,” he says. “It was a big mystery and everyone was kind of twiddling their thumbs looking around at each other thinking, ‘Sh*t, what's he going to do?’”
“But in that time, just around the horse riding and all the fittings and stuff, you spend enough time with each other to get to know each other.”
Once filming began, however, the actor says he bonded with Bloom and the other actors to forge real-life friendships that have lasted well beyond the film’s shoot. Describing the motley ‘Kelly gang’ that audiences didn’t see on screen, Ledger says, “[We were] a drunk gang, probably. A debauched one.”
“We were just good friends and that happens,” he continues. “If you are best friends with people, you create friendships outside the film that can give you a truth to portray and we had that. We gelled as a group and cared about each other, and looked after each other and had each other's backs.”
While Bloom has since gone on to fame and fortune in the likes of the Lord of the Rings films and the emerging Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Ledger says that his slate of upcoming projects possesses more creative than commercial potential, keeping in line with many of his past choices. “My general attitude has been to kick back and stay on the couch and don't leave the house because I'm lazy,” admits Ledger, whose relationship with actress Naomi Watts was reported earlier this week to have ended.
“But this year, it's going to be quite the diverse year,” he maintains. “I'm coming straight off of working with Terry Gilliam on The Brothers Grimm and I'm now going into playing in Lords of Dogtown with [director] Catherine Hardwick, and then I'm doing Brokeback Mountain with Ang Lee.”
“It's a year that's full of fear for me; it's very scary year, but a good one.”
Brokeback Mountain, Lee’s follow-up to the ambitious summer blockbuster Hulk, marks a departure for Ledger from the rugged and decidedly heterosexual characters he’s played in films past. For Ledger, the challenge lies not in the particulars of the character, but rather in trying something new and different with each successive role.
“It's a beautiful love story,” he opines. “There's not a lot of mystery to love stories anymore, and this obviously is a little bit more dynamic than the usual love story.”
“It spans over twenty years and it's Ang Lee, who I can truly believe and entrust this story in his hands,” Ledger continues. “At the same time, it scares the sh*t out of me. I'm frightened of it and so, for that reason, I should confront my fears; I think that you are rewarded for being brave in more ways than one.”
Describing that fear more specifically in terms not only of the project itself but his career in general, Ledger adds, “I’m not ‘frightened’ like I won't let myself out of my house. The fear is in the level of performance and what I have to portray and what I have to feel and the level of the workload, and the pressure of having to perform for such a wonderful director. That's something that inspires you to perform.”
“It brings a level of importance to what you're doing because you're afraid of it, and so, you give it a lot of your time and you give it a lot of your effort to make it good.”
| For The Brothers Grimm, Ledger tried to apply a different approach to developing the character he plays in director Terry Gilliam’s blend of fantasy and reality between the real world and that of the Grimm’s fairy tales. “Terry just unlocks this thing inside of you,” Ledger says. “He gives you the license to be eccentric and he's a mad genius and we'd all follow him anywhere, and we did, certainly, on this.”
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“Originally, I think the studios were expecting The Brothers Grimm with Matt Damon and Heath Ledger to be a very serious movie about two heroes,” the actor continues. “And instead of playing it like two heroes, we played it like two scared girls.”
The actor relished the fact that the film’s $80 million budget did not get in the way of many opportunities to indulge in ridiculous slapstick humor. “No one else would let you do that but Terry. Terry just lets you run wild. So, I was super lucky and super grateful to work with him on that.”
As Ledger continues to build a body of work predicated on challenges rather than safe bets, he confesses that moving from one risky project to another can take its toll. “I think that it has to do with allowing yourself enough preparation time before all of them,” he suggests.
| “It's like, in the next four weeks before I go off to do these jobs, I'm kind of studying all of them right now and I'm preparing myself for all of them. So, I can then forget about three and go and do one and then, pick up where I left off on the next one.”
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Reflecting on his choices, Ledger says he ultimately goes with his own instincts. “I generally like to make sure that I can do it from the first time that I read it. I like to know that I somewhat have a plan anyway. I don’t like to go, ‘oh, I'll figure it out later.’”
Still, Ledger says, much like the roles he’s played in films have appealed to some and been rejected by others, the process is largely intuitive, and often follows a path that can’t quite be defined. “It's about reflex and trusting. I like to know [how I’ll play the role], but how I figure that out, I wouldn't know how to explain that to you.”
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