Memories of Heath

I had the good fortune to meet Heath Ledger just once, at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, the morning after Brokeback Mountain premiered there. I had some trepidations about speaking with the actor -- he was notoriously press-shy, and he had arrived in Toronto having just returned from the Venice Film Festival, where he had given interview after interview to promote Brokeback,The Brothers Grimm, and Casanova, so I figured by the time I got to him, he'd be utterly sick of talking to journalists. But the soft-spoken, thoughtful young man I met allayed any fears I had about an unresponsive interviewee. Slightly hungover after a night out with Terry Gilliam -- who had directed Ledger in Grimm and directed him in his final film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus -- Ledger opened up to me about his career-making Brokeback Mountain role, about his lifelong attitudes toward gays and lesbians, and about his impending fatherhood. We're all still a little shell-shocked by the loss of this young, vibrant actor who seemed to have nothing but one extraordinary performance after another waiting for him. Looking back on this interview, it's sad to remember just how vital and ambitious he was just a few years ago:

Did you have gay friends tell you what a big deal Brokeback Mountain is for queer audiences? “Dude, this is gonna be major -- don’t fuck it up”?
I didn’t really need my friends to tell me that. [Alonso laughs] I understood that it’s an important story and one that hadn’t really been told properly. But I knew there was a certain responsibility.

There was an interview that Ang Lee gave at some point in the production process where he said something along the lines of “We can show Ennis’s and Jack’s feelings for each other through the sheepherding,” and I think a lot of people got nervous that the movie would back away from the physicality of the relationship, which it certainly doesn’t. Was there any kind of negotiating of those scenes, or were you just thrown into it?
No, there had to be choreography involved, purely because for Jake and me, it wasn’t a situation where the director could just say, “OK, now just have fun with this and just roll with it.” It was delicately planned out. But we didn’t really want to rehearse it either; we didn’t really want to sit there and go through the motions as well. The rest was just absolutely trusting the story -- convincing ourselves of the love and committing to it 100%. Had we done anything less, it wouldn’t have done justice to the story.

Are you getting a lot of the “Eww, what’s it like to kiss a guy?” questions? The straight media loves that stuff.
Yeah. Yeah, the straight world seems to be really stuck up on that. That’s fine -- it’s not like I wasn’t prepared for it.

Now, you began your career playing a gay role on Australian television, right?
[Laughs] Yeah!

How did you deal with the media then?
I can’t really remember. I actually remember getting harassed on the street.

Really?
Yeah. [Chuckles] So I had small occasions where I’d get bullied on the streets for it! But I was never out to prove myself or my sexuality -- it didn’t really bother me. I think if that was an issue, I wouldn’t have done [that] show; I wouldn’t have done this film.