Heath Remembered
Heath Ledger, then 21, in an outtake from the cover-story shoot for the August 2000 issue.
“Heath has quite an effect on women,” said Roland Emmerich, who directed Ledger in The Patriot. “Every one of the women in my company came into my office and said, ‘Please cast Heath!’”
“I don’t have a method to my madness,” Ledger told Kevin Sessums. “For me, acting is more about self-exploration.”
Ledger told Sessums, “When anything is blocking my head or there’s worry in my life, I just—whoosh—go sit on Mars or something and look back here at Earth.… You don’t see the fear. You don’t see the pain. You don’t see the movie industry. You don’t see this interview. You don’t see thought. It’s just one solid speck. Then nothing really matters. It just doesn’t.”
“Heath is much more grounded than I was at that age, when it all started happening for me,” said Mel Gibson, Ledger’s co-star in The Patriot.
Ledger hams it up for this outtake …
… and for the magazine’s pages.
“The camera just relaxes on him,” said Rufus Sewell, who co-starred with Ledger in A Knight’s Tale. “When the camera hits certain people, you can feel it sort of go, ‘Ah, that’s O.K. We’re in good hands here.’”
Ledger at an art academy in Prague. “Because I D.J. in L.A., I’ve seen a lot of ‘actory’ types,” said Shannyn Sossamon, Ledger’s love interest in A Knight’s Tale. “Heath is not actory.”
“When Heath smiles, it’s Errol Flynn,” said A Knight’s Tale director Brian Helgeland. “Once every 50 years a guy like that comes along.”
“Yes, he’s sexy—not traditionally handsome, but there is something there in those eyes of his. They can get incredibly compassionate,” said director Shekhar Kapur, who cast Ledger as the lead in the remake of Zoltán Korda’s 1939 classic, The Four Feathers.
“You can see that Heath’s a person who understands a bit more about life—and thought a bit more about it—than just being a kid with an interesting face,” said Kapur.
“Heath doesn’t want to squash an ant,” said his father, Kim Ledger. “He worries about everything from an insect dying onward. He’s very soft inside.… ”
The cover photo from the August 2000 issue of Vanity Fair.
