Interview Brokeback Mountain Star Heath Ledger

By STEVEN REA
philadelphia inquirer
NEW YORK -- "Heath Ledger?" says the manager in the empty Brooklyn bar where the actor was expected the other morning. "Is he going to talk about that gay cowboy movie?"
He is. Walking down the block, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that reads "Brooklyn," Ledger offers a hearty shake and heads to a nearby French place for a double espresso and a discussion of the film that will likely turn his career around -- not to mention turn the heads of audiences.
"Brokeback Mountain," based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx and spun into a heartbreaking Western romance, is about two lonely cowpokes in 1960s Wyoming who herd sheep one summer and fall in love.
Ledger, the Australian who came to Hollywood as Mel Gibson's fierce fighting son in the Revolutionary War drama "The Patriot" (2000), plays Ennis Del Mar, a taciturn range rider who takes a temporary job tending a rancher's livestock.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jack Twist, a rodeo circuit itinerant. Over a couple of months, the two young men share grub, scare off coyotes, and get intimate -- real intimate -- in the frosty nights inside the tent.
What happens next
Both insist they're not "queer." Both start families. Gyllenhaal's gal is played with dash by Anne Hathaway. Ledger's wife is played, with quiet, staggering sadness, by Michelle Williams. Ledger and Williams fell in love last year during the shoot, and now live in Brooklyn with their six-week-old girl, Matilda Rose.
The film spans 20 years and a lot of tears as the men rattle around in unhappy marriages, hooking up for fishing trips and motel assignations. Ennis' love for Jack, and his inability to express it and embrace it, is soul-crushing.
"It was pretty clear that this story hadn't been put to screen," says Ledger, 26, sporting a scruff of a goatee and wearing the black-and-yellow '60s gumboots he wore in "Brokeback Mountain" -- and stole from the wardrobe department. "It's not very often that you come across a story that hasn't been made."
'Risk factor'
The script for "Brokeback" was written seven years ago, and was one of those legendary unproduced gems that, at times, had Gus Van Sant and Joel Schumacher attached to direct, and "Walk the Line's" Joaquin Phoenix as a star. But the subject scared off producers, studios and actors.
"There was this kind of industry-manufactured fear and risk factor that was surrounding the script," says Ledger, whose career, up to "Brokeback Mountain," has been marked by star turns in jaunty historical pieces and big-budget bombs. His resume, in part: "A Knight's Tale" (2001), "The Four Feathers" (2002), "The Order" (2003), this summer's "The Brothers Grimm," and the Christmas Day release "Casanova," a sanitized piece of ribaldry about the legendary Venetian lover.
Ledger read Proulx's story, and the screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, and fell for it. "I truly had a lump in my throat, but ... these manufactured fears started to bleed into my response to the script -- 'Oh, this is risky,' that sort of thing.
"But then that just started to fade away and I thought ... 'What exactly am I risking?' "
What made difference
Oscar-winning director Ang Lee, coming off the superhero flop "Hulk," had seen a glimmer of Ledger's strength in his small part as Billy Bob Thornton's prison-guard son in "Monster's Ball." But it wasn't until they met that Lee was sure.
"In terms of depth of acting and impressiveness of his performance, that would be 'Monster's Ball' for me. But that was a small part," Lee says in a phone interview. "There was still the question: Can he carry the movie? Meeting him, it gave me the feeling that he could ..."
"Heath," he says, "had these Western qualities: brooding, elegiac, tough, conservative and secretive. And also he provides vulnerability and complexity to the character, he carries fear and violence.