Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger and the battle to make Brokeback Mountain
The Heath Ledger Hollywood wanted, and the Heath Ledger we all remember, are two very different things. Fifteen years on from Ledger’s death on January 22 2008, we remember him as one of the most exciting talents of his generation, an actor drawn to troubled, weighty roles – parts in which he could burrow himself, regardless of possible side effects.
But this image of Ledger, of a star who specialised in playing disintegrating men, junkies, psychopaths and cowboys, only arrived after years of being somewhat lost in the wilderness. Prior to his career-altering performance in the landmark romance Brokeback Mountain, he was adrift. Now Annie Proulx’s short story about gay cowboys has been adapted for the stage, it seems an apt time to look back on an actor – and a performance – that sent shockwaves through Hollywood.
“In a way, I was spoon-fed, if you will, a career,” Ledger told Time Magazine in 2005. “It was fully manufactured by a studio that believed that they could put me on their posters and turn me into their bottle of Coca-Cola, their product. I hadn’t figured out properly how to act, and all of a sudden I was being thrown into these lead roles… All my mistakes are on the screen.”
Plucked from Australian obscurity at 18 to star in a short-lived US TV series (“It wanted to be Braveheart but turned out more Xena: Warrior Princess,” his co-star Vera Farmiga once said), Ledger emerged as a movie star during the late-Nineties teen movie boom, becoming a regular on the VHS tapes of swooning teenage girls courtesy of his role in 1999’s 10 Things I Hate About You. But even then, Ledger was different to the leading men of his era. He was a Brando in an sea of Freddie Prinze Jrs.
The work that followed was, for the most part, somewhat beneath him. He has the swagger of a rock star in his medieval comedy A Knight’s Tale, one of his early hits, but other parts were unforgiving bombs: a trio of grand historical flops like The Patriot, The Four Feathers and Ned Kelly, and the nonsensical occult thriller The Sin Eater.
Where Ledger felt most at home were in less showy roles, ones that bristled with internal angst. Like his brief cameo as a suicidal policeman in the opening scenes of Monster’s Ball, a role overshadowed by the film’s later histrionics, but captivating enough to later bag him the part of Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain.
Set up almost a decade earlier with Gus Van Sant attached to direct and Matt Damon and Joaquin Phoenix lined up to star, it was long a tough sell in Hollywood, not only when it came to financiers, but also bankable names – Mark Wahlberg famously turning down the Ennis role after consulting with his priest. It was only after Ang Lee, fresh from a run of critical hits including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Ice Storm, signed on that the film was finally set in motion.
Screenwriter Diana Ossana had become a fan of Ledger’s through her young daughter, who had advised her to watch some of his films. She immediately warmed to him, and believed him to be the perfect embodiment of Ennis.
“It's obviously the most complex and internal character that I have been offered to play,” Ledger said in 2006. “It was the perfect script; it was the perfect director. It was a story that hadn’t been told, which is extremely rare in this industry or anywhere really. I thought I’d be crazy to turn it down.”
Despite being warned by his agents that taking the role could be “career suicide”, Ledger signed on, joined by Jake Gyllenhaal as his on-screen lover Jack. It is arguably Ledger’s strongest performance – he is tragically stoic throughout, but with an open, pleading humanity that betrays his desperation to be loved. It’s a well-researched but never overly technical bit of acting, despite Ledger that much of what was on-screen was incredibly specific and deliberate, particularly his voice and facial expressions.
“I wanted the light to be too bright for him and the world to be too loud,” he explained in 2006. “But it’s also a real ranch-hand’s face. Even the stiff top lip. It’s something that farmers in Australia do to keep the flies out of their mouths.”
Speaking in 2015, screenwriter Diana Ossana remembered that Ledger took the responsibility of the role incredibly seriously, and felt enormous relief whenever he was told that he was doing a good job.
“At a certain point Heath came down and said, ‘How am I doing, how am I doing?’” Ossana recalled. “And I looked at him and said, ‘You’re making me cry,’ and he got so overwhelmed by emotion that he ran out of the building into the dark. I ran after him and asked if he was OK, and he said, ‘I just need to be alone for a little bit.’ And then he came back about 30 minutes later and did the scene again. Actors like that don’t come along very often in one’s lifetime.”
Ledger also received praise from Proulx, who said in 2006 that Ledger had erased the image of Ennis as she had written it in her original short story. “He was so visceral,” she explained. “How did this actor get inside my head so well? He understood more about the character than I did.”
Jake Gyllenhaal had met Ledger previously, both of them starting out in the industry at the same time, and both struggling to find their place in a film landscape that often didn’t know what to do with them as young actors.
“Heath was always somebody who I admired,” Gyllenhaal said. “He was way beyond his years as a human, in a way. I wasn’t quite sure where he came from. I mean, I know he’s from Perth, but I wasn’t really quite sure where he came from, and I think that’s the feeling most people got when they were around him and why he was so extraordinary.”
When shooting began, Ledger almost immediately fell in love with actress Michelle Williams, who played his on-screen wife. The pair would become pseudo-parental figures on the set, sharing a trailer and cooking food for the cast and crew. They would have a daughter, Matilda, in the midst of the film’s release.
Upon Brokeback Mountain’s premiere at the 2005 Venice Film Festival, Ledger’s performance was deemed a revelation, and immediately landed him in the conversation for the following year’s Oscars. Writing in the New York Times, critic Stephen Holden described how Ledger “magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character,” adding: “It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando.”
At the 2006 Oscars, many expected Brokeback to take home the night’s biggest trophy, an honor bestowed on the film at almost every other major awards show that year. But the film was infamously beaten by Crash, the endlessly maligned racism melodrama starring Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon. Ledger was also snubbed, the Best Actor prize going to Capote’s Philip Seymour Hoffman, who in a tragic coincidence also died of a drug overdose in the years that followed.
The snubs contributed to accusations of institutional homophobia on the part of Hollywood’s old guard, a stance bolstered by the staggering controversy that surrounded the film throughout its release. Endlessly mocked by conservative reporters on Fox News and banned from playing in certain Salt Lake City cinemas due to its content, the film became an unexpected lightning rod for controversy, Christian groups determining the film was gay propaganda, and both Ledger and Gyllenhaal having to publicly defend or at least explain their decision to star in it. It was an embarrassing spectacle then, but even more so today.
“I think it’s a real shame,” Ledger told a journalist in 2005 who had asked him about those who label the film “disgusting.” He continued: “I think it’s immature for one, really immature, [for them] to go out of their way to discuss or to voice their disgust, or negative opinions, about the way two people wish to love one another. At least voice your opinions on how two people show hate, or violent, or anger to one another.”
Though Ledger was straight, Brokeback Mountain cemented him as a gay icon, with his eventual death sparking particular mourning from the queer community. Like James Dean and River Phoenix before him, Ledger was a handsome, haunted movie star taken from the world far too soon.
But that Ledger achieved peak stardom playing a gay character, one tortured and wounded and unflinchingly sexual, and responded to prying questions about the “challenges” of kissing a man on-screen with a nonchalant shrug, only furthered his appeal.
“It was clear that there was something very specific to the queer community about his fame,” film theorist B Ruby Rich said shortly after Ledger’s death. “It’s almost as though he’d been taken up as one of ours, so his death felt very, very personal. People felt implicated in what happened to him.”
When people talk of Ledger’s fearlessness in Brokeback Mountain, it’s often laced with a quieter strand of homophobia, as if he must have been incredibly brave to pretend to be in love with another man on-screen – journalists in 2005 lazily asking questions about what it was like for him to kiss Gyllenhaal, and play any sort of gay intimacy. It’s a line of questioning worthy of eye rolls, and largely misses the point when it comes to what was truly brave about the part.
Faced with a career that would have likely resulted in greater riches and, at the time, far more fame (he notoriously turned down Spider-Man), Ledger rejected it in favour of artistic experimentation, seeking out visionaries like Ang Lee, Todd Haynes (on 2007’s I’m Not There) and Terry Gilliam (on 2005’s The Brothers Grimm and what would be his final film, 2009’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) and attempting to emulate the creative diversity of acting icons of the past.
It was a choice that, in his lifetime, often resulted in mockery, as evidenced by the cringeworthy fanboy outrage that arrived upon his casting as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Sneered at for his early films, Ledger ended up delivering what is undeniably one of cinema’s all-time greatest villain performances.
Like Brokeback Mountain, it was a career choice that was risky and enveloped by ridiculous controversy, but ultimately something incredibly special.
When it came to his work, Ledger was often on the right side of history, and it’s a further tragedy that he didn’t live long enough to see just how right he was. Even for someone spoken of as dark and brooding and drawn to extremities, he’d inevitably look back on all that outrage and giggle.
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