In Stetson or Wig, He’s Hard to Pin Down By SARAH LYALL
Published: November 4, 2007
THE neighborhood was nothing special, just another anonymous street in North London, and the corrugated-metal front door suggested the entrance to an auto-repair shop or maybe some kind of studio. But it opened into another world: a lush courtyard nestled inside a striking modern house with acres of white walls, exotic works of art and a roof garden, complete with burbling fountain.
Behind the door too was Heath Ledger, the current tenant of the house, making coffee in the glass-walled kitchen and presenting his own deceptive exterior. What you see is a strapping 28-year-old with sleepy eyes, an amused crinkly grin and out-of-control blondish hair, dressed on this particular occasion in a hooded sweatshirt and ripped jeans hanging low to reveal the waistband of a pair of light blue flannel underpants. What you get is a lot less obvious: a serious but hard-to-pin-down actor disguised as a California stoner. (He played one once, in “Lords of Dogtown.”)
Mr. Ledger has resisted typecasting since his first Hollywood film, the perfectly decent teenage-romance comedy “10 Things I Hate About You,” filled him with such foreboding about his possible future as a fluffy heartthrob that he turned down work for a year because all he was being offered were similar parts. Although he has since appeared in light, romantic-hero roles in films like “A Knight’s Tale” and “Casanova,” Mr. Ledger has also played a sensitive prison guard, a heroin addict spiraling out of control and, in a revelation of a part, a reluctantly gay cowboy in “Brokeback Mountain”: a hodgepodge of characters that are deliberately unlike one another.
“I feel like I’m wasting time if I repeat myself,” he explained. Nor is he ever happy with his performance, exactly. “I can’t say I was proud of my work,” Mr. Ledger declared of his latest role, in “I’m Not There” (Nov. 21), Todd Haynes’s strange, audacious new film, which attempts to get to the heart of Bob Dylan by dancing around him. “I feel the same way about everything I do. The day I say, ‘It’s good’ is the day I should start doing something else.”
In a film that uses multiple actors to portray multiple aspects of Dylan, Mr. Ledger plays Dylan the media superstar, a charismatic, swaggering figure who parties with celebrities, wears look-at-me-but-leave-me-alone sunglasses and watches his personal life collapse under the pressures of his public persona. Yes, but what does the film mean?
Mr. Ledger laughed and compared “I’m Not There” to a Rubik’s Cube, insoluble by mere mortals.
“I think it’s one of those films that you have to kind of accept and invite instead of trying to challenge and solve,” he said. “Bob Dylan himself defies description, and I think Todd was aiming to represent him. He was not trying to sum him up or define him.”
In a telephone interview from Berlin, where he was promoting “I’m Not There,” Mr. Haynes said that Mr. Ledger’s character was inspired by “photographs of Dylan taken in the mid-’60s when he was hanging out in New York locations with dark-rimmed eyeglasses and shooting pool or reading the newspapers in the classic Godardian striped crew-necked shirt.”
James Dean too. “Dylan was completely inspired by James Dean, and Heath has a little bit of James Dean in him, even physically, a kind of precocious seriousness,” Mr. Haynes went on. “As adult actors seem more and more infantile and refusing to grow up, middle-aged guys with their baseball caps, Heath is one of those young people who have a real intuition, a maturity beyond their years.”
Making the role all the more complicated was that Mr. Ledger’s character is meant, in a way, to be a Dylan twice removed. In the movie Mr. Ledger is not playing Dylan per se, but an actor famous, in the fictional world of “I’m Not There,” for portraying Dylan in his early years as a singer-songwriter of protest music.
But because Christian Bale, the actor who plays this early Dylan in the film, was scheduled to film his scenes after Mr. Ledger, Mr. Ledger said he was faced with “playing an actor portraying Christian portraying a Dylanesque character, and not being sure what Christian was going to do.” Or, to put it another way, “Who was I playing when I was acting?”
It all tied him in knots. “I stressed out a little too much,” Mr. Ledger said.
He tends to do that. He is here in London filming the latest episode of the “Batman” franchise, “The Dark Knight.” (Mr. Bale, as it happens, plays Batman; Mr. Ledger plays the Joker.) It is a physically and mentally draining role — his Joker is a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy” he said cheerfully — and, as often happens when he throws himself into a part, he is not sleeping much.
“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.” One night he took an Ambien, which failed to work. He took a second one and fell into a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing.
Even as he spoke, Mr. Ledger was hard-pressed to keep still. He got up and poured more coffee. He stepped outside into the courtyard and smoked a cigarette. He shook his hair out from under its hood, put a rubber band around it, took out the rubber band, put on a hat, took off the hat, put the hood back up. He went outside and had another cigarette. Polite and charming, he nonetheless gave off the sense that the last thing he wanted to do was delve deep into himself for public consumption. “It can be a little distressing to have to overintellectualize yourself,” is how he put it, a little apologetically.
Conducting a tour of the house, which he is renting for a few months, he made wry remarks about the art. One painting depicts a crowd of creatures who appear to be in hell, but who seem determined to extract as much sexual pleasure as they can from their eternity of free time; Mr. Ledger has turned another one around and hung it upside down, to no apparent ill advantage.
An open bag with clothes spilling out lay on the floor of the master bedroom. “I’m kind of addicted to moving,” Mr. Ledger said, perhaps on account of having had to shuttle back and forth after his parents’ divorce, when he was 11. He carries his interests around with him, and his kitchen table was awash in objects: a chess set, assorted books, various empty glasses, items of clothing. Here too was his Joker diary, which he began compiling four months before filming began. It is filled with images and thoughts helpful to the Joker back story, like a list of things the Joker would find funny. (AIDS is one of them.) Mr. Ledger seemed almost embarrassed that the book had been spotted, as if he had been caught trying to get extra credit in school.
“He’s very disciplined and takes it very seriously,” said Marc Forster, who directed Mr. Ledger in “Monster’s Ball,” in which he played a troubled prison guard. Mr. Ledger came to the part at the last minute, but caught on quickly. “Heath at the time was something like 22, and I thought: ‘He’s incredible. He’s so smart and so intuitive and so observant, and he really understood the part and the character.’”
Also on the table is a winsome photograph of Mr. Ledger’s daughter, Matilda, now a toddler. (Mr. Ledger met Matilda’s mother, the actress Michelle Williams, while filming “Brokeback Mountain” and fell into a very public whirlwind romance and then into loved-up domestication in Brooklyn; they both appear together in “I’m Not There” but have recently separated. He is leery of talking about their relationship, but heaps spontaneous praise on Ms. Williams’s performance.)
Mr. Ledger now lives in Manhattan, and, when he’s home, likes to play chess with the chess sharks who hang out in Washington Square Park; sometimes he beats them. But mostly he likes to hang out with Matilda— “it’s kind of like your whole body has a lump in its throat,” he said, of having to be away — and goes back as often as he can to see her.
Mr. Ledger was born in Perth, Australia, a place so far away, he said, that “sometimes when you’re there, it feels like the earth really is flat, and you’re sitting right on the edge.” He acted in some Australian soap operas before moving to Hollywood in pursuit of a girlfriend. (The relationship did not last.) He was cast in “10 Things” opposite Julia Stiles, starred in a brief-lived television series and began appearing in movies like “A Knight’s Tale,” playing a swashbuckling medieval lover-jouster.
“I was more concerned with having a good time than with focusing on work,” he said.
But suddenly he realized that he cared. “I started to look at the work and think, ‘Oh, God, maybe I should be taking this seriously, because people are going to see this,’” he said. “All I saw were mistakes — a lack of care, lack of attention to detail.”
Among other things, he began working with Gerry Grennell, his dialect coach, who has seen him through a dizzying spectrum of dialects and intonations. (“It’s rare that there’s a role that requires an Australian accent,” Mr. Ledger said.) Among his next projects are a film directed by Terry Gilliam, and another by Terrence Malick. Mr. Ledger is learning to play the piano and to sing. He also directs music videos, has a small independent record label called Masses Music in Los Angeles and is planning to direct a film at the end of next year.
One of the things that struck him most about the Dylan who emerges in “I’m Not There,” he said, was Dylan’s continual effort to resist easy categorization and his willingness to “recreate himself and not conform to people’s ambitions to put him in a box.”
That is how Mr. Ledger feels too, and he likes to keep an element of surprise, for the world at large and for himself.
“Some people find their shtick,” he said. “I’ve never figured out who ‘Heath Ledger’ is on film: ‘This is what you expect when you hire me, and it will be recognizable.’”
He continued: “People always feel compelled to sum you up, to presume that they have you and can describe you. That’s fine. But there are many stories inside of me and a lot I want to achieve outside of one flat note.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/movies/moviesspecial/04lyal.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=moviesspecial
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